TiVo Desktop for Mac 1.9.3 is out and universal...

[Dennis Wilkinson]

I don't have an Intel Mac myself, but I know folks have been waiting for this, and I know not everyone skims MacUpdate or VersionTracker religiously... ;)

Head on over to http://www.tivo.com/desktop/ for the download.

Looks like there's are a few other changes besides being universal, but I won't have time to play with it until this evening.

[EwanG]

Of course it still doesn't support the Tivo To Go functionality :(

Oh well...

[Dennis Wilkinson]

Of course it still doesn't support the Tivo To Go functionality

We just got to the beginning of "mid-2006". When a company promises software in a range like that, it's unusual that they mean the beginning of the range... ;)

[TydalForce]

well, we're getting there... its a step forward, and one that at least shows they're not ignoring us

[cwoody222]

*yawn*

wake me up when TiVo does something SUBSTANTIAL for the Mac community.

even better if it's not months and months overdue.

[davezatz]

Looks like there's are a few other changes besides being universal
Oh, really...?! Did you get a chance to poke around and how close do you think we are to TTG? ;)

[Dennis Wilkinson]

Oh, really...?! Did you get a chance to poke around and how close do you think we are to TTG? ;)

For starters, there's a "FileVideo.plugin" that wasn't there before. The UI doesn't look any different at first glance. Haven't had any real time to poke at it yet, that was just my "did the same things get installed as last time" look.

[TydalForce]

FileVideo.plugin ?

Interesting, given that its only for Photos and Music... hmmmmmsies....

[Dan203]

Any chance this new plug-in enables the ComeBack portion of TiVoToGo? TiVo uses a similarly named plug-in on the PC side to support that functionality.

Dan

[AugieMac]

So if I gather this correct there is no way currently for my Intel MacBook Pro to get movies off my Tivo box?

[davezatz]

So if I gather this correct there is no way currently for my Intel MacBook Pro to get movies off my Tivo box?

As it stands, it may be splitting hairs but you can *transfer* shows to your Mac, but you'll have no way to decrypt them for playback. You'll need a PC... for now. Unless there's some secret functionality that Dennis uncovers. ;)

[mikellanes]

Does tivo tool not work in rosetta?

[Weaselboy]

I'm seeing this as a good sign only because the presence of a universal binary must mean they are using xcode now as a development tool.

[Dennis Wilkinson]

OK, I've done a bit more digging. Just for giggles, I'll walk through it.

Starting the TiVo Desktop server also placed a "TiVoShows" folder in my home directory. Just placing a file in that directory didn't do anything, even after starting and stopping the server.

So, I look at the "Raw" preferences, i.e., in Terminal:

defaults read com.tivo.desktop

and see the following in the output:

FileVideo = {
Enabled = 0;
ShareAll = 1;
SharedItems = ("/Users/dennis/TiVoShows");
SharingName = "Elroy (Dennis J Wilkinson II)";
VideoUIEnabled = 0;
vKey = "";
};

Hmm. Let's try enabling it:

defaults write com.tivo.desktop FileVideo -dict-add Enabled -bool true

and restart the server. Hey hey... my Mac is in my Now Playing list -- with the MPEG file I added listed. But what's this "VideoUIEnabled" switch?

defaults write com.tivo.desktop FileVideo -dict-add VideoUIEnabled -bool true

Re-open the TiVo Desktop pref pane and, yup... there's a Video tab now, that'll let you enable/disable video sharing, set the location, enter your MAK, and set a video share name.

In other words, as Dan surmised above, they implemented TiVoToComeback! :)

If you want to play with this yourself, just:

1) Stop the TiVo Desktop server in the pref pane. Close the pref pane.

2) Launch the Terminal utility (in /Applications/Utiliities) and, at the prompt, enter the following command (copy and paste is your friend) and press return:
defaults write com.tivo.desktop FileVideo -dict-add VideoUIEnabled -bool true
If you have Apple's developer tools installed, you can open the com.tivo.desktop.plist file in your preferences folder with the Property List Editor and change the setting that way, too.

3) Reopen the pref pane, turn on video sharing, and set things up as you like. I don't know if you need to enter your MAK -- I didn't, and a plain-jane MPEG transferred OK, but I haven't tried a .tivo file.)

4) Start the server again.

Disclaimer time: Use at your own risk. If it's there, but turned off, there may very well be a reason for it (as in, it might not be ready for prime time, may have ghastly bugs, et cetera.) I've transferred exactly one MPEG file of the right flavor so far, and it worked. But if this thing goes off and trashes your hard drive, devours your children, whatever: don't blame me or TiVo. It was hidden, after all.

OK, now I'm going to go watch Lost, and use this thing for what I bought it for... ;)

Edit: To make things easier for those who don't like (or even know about) the Terminal application, I whipped together an AppleScript applet that toggles the VideoUIEnabled setting (and disables the "Enabled" setting when turning off the UI.) Consider the applet to be in the public domain, and completely devoid of any warranty. While I'd expect it to work for most configurations, it may not. It does no version checking whatsoever, but the worst that should mean right now would be preferences that do nothing in older versions of TiVo Desktop. Use at your own risk.

To use the applet, just download the attachment, unzip it, and double-click. It's a toggle, so one run enables, the next run disables.

[davezatz]

Wow, that's incredible, awesome news! Thanks for figuring it out and documenting it. :D

[TydalForce]

That's awesome and THANK YOU for the spiffy walkthrough!

Any tips on quick-and-easy ways of converting video files to work with the TiVo? I have QuickTime Pro and VLC, and can probably get my hands on anything else that might be useful... (c:

[bedelman]

That's awesome and THANK YOU for the spiffy walkthrough!

Any tips on quick-and-easy ways of converting video files to work with the TiVo? I have QuickTime Pro and VLC, and can probably get my hands on anything else that might be useful... (c:I've been using ffmpegX for a while now -- but where I would have to place the resulting MPEG-2 files into a shared folder where Virtual PC running TiVo Desktop could reach them

Use MPEG-2 for the video and MP2 for the audio.

I set the bit rate to 1000 and the resolution to 640 x 480 (with 4:3 aspect ratio)

Make sure you change the file name extension on the resulting file so that it's .mpg since ffmpegX will put something like ".ff" at the end instead.

[junebughunter]

I've got about as far as Dennis, pretty cool so far, definitely looks to be promising...and no issues yet...

[Gunnyman]

awesome news for the unhacked standalone peeps!
Thanks for poking around Dennis!

[TydalForce]

I've been using ffmpegX for a while now -- but where I would have to place the resulting MPEG-2 files into a shared folder where Virtual PC running TiVo Desktop could reach them

Use MPEG-2 for the video and MP2 for the audio.

I set the bit rate to 1000 and the resolution to 640 x 480 (with 4:3 aspect ratio)

Make sure you change the file name extension on the resulting file so that it's .mpg since ffmpegX will put something like ".ff" at the end instead.

I was playing with it last night. I don't think I had my settings quite like that, so I'll try it again tonight when I'm home.

Oddly, it would start the conversion, get to 100%, and then keep going... I usually cancelled it about 108%. Ever have that happen to you? Does it eventually stop?

[funkdaddy]

Nice work, this should replace my use for Galleon.

Hey, does this version still let you stream AAC files if you have LAME installed?

[cwoody222]

I have a preset setting file that you can "load" into ffmpegX that will handle MPEG-2 conversion that Tivo accepts.

PM me if anyone wants it. (I get decent response so demand is out there)


Yes, sometimes my ffmpegX conversions go past 100%. They do stop eventually. I can't explain it.

[mimyc]

Ugh. Why did it have to be ffmpegx? I've never had good results with that app. My latest attempt got me no video. iSquint4Tivo anyone? Anyone?

[funkdaddy]

Ugh. Why did it have to be ffmpegx? I've never had good results with that app. My latest attempt got me no video. iSquint4Tivo anyone? Anyone?
you can use VLC if you don't like ffMpegX... I've had to use VLC for some things and ffMpegX for other to get them to encode right. I wrote a drag n drop applescript to convert with VLC. It's not perfect, but I can post it if you like.

[mimyc]

That'd be great. I'm using the beta of VLC for Intel right now so I don't know how productive I'll be. :) So far it is great at doing an impression of iTunes Visualizer...... unfortunately it does it when it is supposed to be playing Doctor Who episode.....

[submariner]

I was wondering if I could get some help...

I tried the terminal strings exactly as shown, and when I read the com.tivo.desktop file immideately afterwards, the file reads:

{
FileVideo = {
Enabled = 1;
ShareAll = 1;
SharedItems = ("/Users/aaron/TiVoShows");
SharingName = "Bohemoth (Aaron)";
VideoUIEnabled = 1;
vKey = "";
};
VideoLibraryName = Library;
iPhoto = {Enabled = 1; ShareAll = 1; SharingName = "Aaron's Photos on Bohemoth"; };
iTunes = {Enabled = 1; ShareAll = 1; SharingName = "Aaron's Music on Bohemoth"; };
}

Yet, after restarting the TiVo Desktop software, the Video tab isn't there and my computer does not show in the now playing list. re-reading the file shows that the values have reset to "0" as shown here:

{
FileVideo = {
Enabled = 0;
ShareAll = 1;
SharedItems = ("/Users/aaron/TiVoShows");
SharingName = "Bohemoth (Aaron)";
VideoUIEnabled = 0;
vKey = "";
};
VideoLibraryName = Library;
iPhoto = {Enabled = 1; ShareAll = 1; SharingName = "Aaron's Photos on Bohemoth"; };
iTunes = {Enabled = 1; ShareAll = 1; SharingName = "Aaron's Music on Bohemoth"; };
}

Any idea on what's going on?

[Dennis Wilkinson]

Not sure, but I'd be absolutely sure that you've stopped the server and closed System Preferences before entering the commands in Terminal. Could be that one or the other is holding a stale version of the preferences around and writing them back to disk at some other time.

[planetboom]

Not sure, but I'd be absolutely sure that you've stopped the server and closed System Preferences before entering the commands in Terminal. Could be that one or the other is holding a stale version of the preferences around and writing them back to disk at some other time.


I've entered the code and now see the video tab. In my now playing list, I now see my computer. However, I have 3 videos in my home/TiVOShows folder: 1.mpg, 1.vob, and 1 .m2v... but for some reason, nothing is showing up in my Now Playing/Mac.

Any ideas?

Thanks

[Dennis Wilkinson]

Make sure the mpeg video is in one of the formats described here:

http://customersupport.tivo.com/knowbase/root/public/tv251080.htm?

I don't know when the server looks in the folder to see if there are files to be served up. Once you've got files in the folder that should work, try restarting the server from System Preferences. If that works, it should be possible to write a folder action AppleScript that does that for you.

[davezatz]

I've entered the code and now see the video tab. In my now playing list, I now see my computer. However, I have 3 videos in my home/TiVOShows folder: 1.mpg, 1.vob, and 1 .m2v... but for some reason, nothing is showing up in my Now Playing/Mac.

Any ideas?

Thanks
I haven't done any mac experimenting yet, but on the PC it only shows video files it "recognizes." .vob and .m2v are definitely out of the question, and only MPEG2s of certain specifications are supported.

[Unix_Beard]

I now have access to all the .tivo files I've archived over the past year. Nice! Thanks for finding this.

[mckingsley]

Yeah well this certainly makes things a lot easier now. It's nice knowing that I don't have to use Galleon anymore. And thanks to the script I got from cwoody, ffmpegx does a nice job of encoding. I do agree though that someone should make a nice whole package kind of like what someone mentioned isquint4tivo. Installing ffmpegx is still a slight pain.

[bedelman]

Yeah well this certainly makes things a lot easier now. It's nice knowing that I don't have to use Galleon anymore. And thanks to the script I got from cwoody, ffmpegx does a nice job of encoding. I do agree though that someone should make a nice whole package kind of like what someone mentioned isquint4tivo. Installing ffmpegx is still a slight pain.

Does this work?

Mac program to transcode to Tivo compatable mpg (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=291017)

[planetboom]

Make sure the mpeg video is in one of the formats described here:

I don't know when the server looks in the folder to see if there are files to be served up. Once you've got files in the folder that should work, try restarting the server from System Preferences. If that works, it should be possible to write a folder action AppleScript that does that for you.


I've got some different video files, but none seem to be showing up and I'm not sure how to convert to MPEG2. Can I use QT Pro or iMovie to convert?

Thanks

[bedelman]

I've got some different video files, but none seem to be showing up and I'm not sure how to convert to MPEG2. Can I use QT Pro or iMovie to convert?

ThanksTo do MPEG-2 with QuickTime, I think you need to purchase the MPEG-2 codec package from Apple.

I've gotten along fairly well using either ffmpegX, MPEG Streamclip, or VLC to handle what I need to do


I use ffmpegX to handle things like AVI files
I use MPEG Streamclip to handle DVD files created with my DVD Recorder with TiVo boxes
I use VLC when I can't get anything else to work correctly

[davezatz]

Well, I moved a .tivo file from PC to my NAS and changed the video directory in the Desktop software... but my TiVo server is not publishing music, photos, or videos. I seem to recall this was a problem before. I also restarted TiVo services a few times and rebooted of course. Hmmm... I'm running 10.3.9 fully patched and have tried firewall on with TiVo allowed and firewall off. Anything else I should take a look at?

[davezatz]

To do MPEG-2 with QuickTime, I think you need to purchase the MPEG-2 codec package from Apple.

I seem to remember something... not quite right... with Apple's MPEG2 plugin. Anyone know what I'm thining of? More importantly does it actually prepare video correctly for TiVo? :)

[planetboom]

To do MPEG-2 with QuickTime, I think you need to purchase the MPEG-2 codec package from Apple.

I've gotten along fairly well using either ffmpegX, MPEG Streamclip, or VLC to handle what I need to do


I use ffmpegX to handle things like AVI files
I use MPEG Streamclip to handle DVD files created with my DVD Recorder with TiVo boxes
I use VLC when I can't get anything else to work correctly


How are you using VLC? I have VLC, but I can't find any ability to convert mpg or avi to mpeg2.

[bedelman]

How are you using VLC? I have VLC, but I can't find any ability to convert mpg or avi to mpeg2.
The current version of VLC has an "export" function under the file menu (or something like that)

[bedelman]

I seem to remember something... not quite right... with Apple's MPEG2 plugin. Anyone know what I'm thining of? More importantly does it actually prepare video correctly for TiVo? :)I know there's a problem with MPEG-2 playback with files that are taken from the TiVo -- but I don't know if there's a problem going the other way.

[bedelman]

Well, I moved a .tivo file from PC to my NAS and changed the video directory in the Desktop software... but my TiVo server is not publishing music, photos, or videos. I seem to recall this was a problem before. I also restarted TiVo services a few times and rebooted of course. Hmmm... I'm running 10.3.9 fully patched and have tried firewall on with TiVo allowed and firewall off. Anything else I should take a look at?Does the entry for the computer appear in the Music, Photos, and More section at all? If not, make sure that TiVo Desktop is "On" (I had a bad .tivo file that would keep crashing it and turning it "Off").

There have also been times where an unusual character in the Rendezvous/Bonjour name of the computer would cause trouble. You can edit the Computer Name by going to the Sharing preference pane (the name field is at the top of the window)

[Kripto]

I installed the Universal Binary of the TivoDesktop on my Macbook Pro.

When I looked at the preferencesPane it just said "Loading Tivo Desktop..."
When I looked at the /var/log/system.log it had many lines stating that TivoDesktop was crashing fairly regularly.

Then while playing a game, the machine crashed and rebooted. (4 times in an hour)

I disabled Ventrillo (A VoIP app for gaming), and it crashed again..

I then removed the TivoDesktop Preference Pane and rebooted..

Machine is running fine now..

I'm going to wait till another rev before I try that again.. I really don't need my laptop crashing.

[davezatz]

Does the entry for the computer appear in the Music, Photos, and More section at all? If not, make sure that TiVo Desktop is "On" (I had a bad .tivo file that would keep crashing it and turning it "Off").

There have also been times where an unusual character in the Rendezvous/Bonjour name of the computer would cause trouble. You can edit the Computer Name by going to the Sharing preference pane (the name field is at the top of the window)

Doesn't show up in Music, Photos and doesn't show up in Now Playing. I did change my sharing name to just Dave and restart the TiVo service. No luck... I remember this happening before and I think there were others with a mysterious failure to start? Anyhow testing is on hold now - I've had to relinquish the Mac so my fiance can conduct her evening email and web browsing. :)

[gonzotek]

...I've had to relinquish the Mac so my fiance can conduct her evening email and web browsing. :)Ahhh, the joy of pending matrimonial bliss! That's why mine has her own laptop and TiVo ;).

[Welshdog]

and it worked - well I can see my computer in NPL, I didn't try converting a file.

So now what is the text string to restore it to the defaults? I don't want to leave this on and temp the Tivo fates.

[Dennis Wilkinson]

Doesn't show up in Music, Photos and doesn't show up in Now Playing. I did change my sharing name to just Dave and restart the TiVo service. No luck... I remember this happening before and I think there were others with a mysterious failure to start? Anyhow testing is on hold now - I've had to relinquish the Mac so my fiance can conduct her evening email and web browsing. :)

In addition to making sure it's really running as Bob mentioned above, you can also try pulling down a copy of Bonjour Browser (http://www.tildesoft.com/Files/BonjourBrowser.dmg) and make sure that the services are being advertised correctly. I seem to recall someone around here having an issue after installing 1.9.2 where TiVo Desktop tried to register the service names twice (it'd be in the logs). Deleting the preferences files (/Library/Preferences/com.tivo.desktop and /Users/yourusername/Library/Preferences/com.tivo.desktop.plist) and starting fresh solved that problem.

[Dennis Wilkinson]

So now what is the text string to restore it to the defaults? I don't want to leave this on and temp the Tivo fates.

If you want to disable it, this would do the trick:


defaults write com.tivo.desktop FileVideo -dict-add Enabled -bool false
defaults write com.tivo.desktop FileVideo -dict-add VideoUIEnabled -bool false

[Welshdog]

I thought that was it, but not being the least bit programmy I didn't want to dork itup.

This all bodes well for our "mid year" realease of TTG for Mac.

Excellent!

[A@ron]

Does this work?

Mac program to transcode to Tivo compatable mpg (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=291017)

bedelman has been kind enough to host this file on his iDisk
http://homepage.mac.com/bedelman/Movie2Tivo.zip

It's a simple GUI wrapper to a few open source tools.
It will convert avi files if you install the included codec. Should work with mpg to mpg conversion too.
It will even do batch encoding.

Program Limitations
It does not like file paths or file names with spaces in them or special characters.
It's a WIP beta. But it should be safe and not damage your system.

Please give me some feedback or suggestions via PM or the linked thread. Thanks!

[funkdaddy]

Here is an applescript to use VLC, it's nothing amazing - I just whipped it together, so use at your own risk.


on open these_items
set theList to {"Small (320x240)", "Small Letterbox (320x180)", "Medium (544x480)", "Medium Letterbox (544x306)", "Large (720x480)", "Large Letterbox (720x405)"}
set vidSize to item 1 of (choose from list theList with prompt "Please choose the size closest to your input file:" without empty selection allowed) -- default items "Small (320x240)"
set aspect to "4:3"

if vidSize is "Small (320x240)" then
set vidWidth to 320
set vidHeight to 240
end if

if vidSize is "Small Letterbox (320x180)" then
set vidWidth to 320
set vidHeight to 180
set aspect to "16:9"
end if

if vidSize is "Medium (544x480)" then
set vidWidth to 544
set vidHeight to 480
end if

if vidSize is "Medium Letterbox (544x306)" then
set vidWidth to 544
set vidHeight to 306
set aspect to "16:9"
end if

if vidSize is "Large (720x480)" then
set vidWidth to 720
set vidHeight to 480
end if

if vidSize is "Large Letterbox (720x405)" then
set vidWidth to 720
set vidHeight to 405
set aspect to "16:9"
end if

set outputDir to "/Users/xxxx/TiVo"
set appLoc to "/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC"

repeat with this_item in these_items
tell application "Finder"
if kind of this_item is "folder" then
--handle error
else
copy the name of this_item to the filename
copy the displayed name of this_item to displayName
copy the extension hidden of this_item to extensionHidden
copy the name extension of this_item to fileExtension
if the filename is not the displayName then
copy the displayName to the filename
end if
end if
tell me to activate

set fPath to POSIX path of this_item

set inputFile to fPath

set OldDelims to AppleScript's text item delimiters
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "." & fileExtension
set outputFile to text items of displayName
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ""
set outputFile to (outputFile & ".mpg") as text
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to OldDelims
set cmd to appLoc & " \"" & inputFile & "\" " & ¬
"--width=" & vidWidth & " --height=" & vidHeight & " --sout='#transcode{vcodec=mp2v,vb=6144,fps=29.97,acodec=mpga,a b=128,channels=2}:std{access=file,mux=ps,url=\"" & ¬
outputDir & "/" & outputFile & "\"}' --aspect-ratio=\"" & aspect & ¬
"\" --autocrop &> /dev/null &"
--set the clipboard to cmd

--display dialog cmd
--tell application "Terminal"
-- do script cmd
--end tell
do shell script cmd
end tell
end repeat
end open


Paste this into a new script editor window and save as an App. make sure to change:

set outputDir to "/Users/xxxx/TiVo"

to your output directory.

[Corixidae]

I've found you can enable the "Videos" tab in the TiVo Desktop preference pane merely by holding down the Command (a.k.a. "open Apple") key while you click the TiVo Desktop icon in the System Preferences window. No messing with terminal commands that way.

Also, if you hold down the Option key while you click the TiVo Desktop pref pane icon, you get a debugging/logging option.

[Tivotony]

Doesn't show up in Music, Photos and doesn't show up in Now Playing. I did change my sharing name to just Dave and restart the TiVo service. No luck... I remember this happening before and I think there were others with a mysterious failure to start? Anyhow testing is on hold now - I've had to relinquish the Mac so my fiance can conduct her evening email and web browsing. :)

Try toggling off the 'Publish my video' Tab. I had the same problem. The server would be visable and then disappear. I tseems as soon as I 'Pubish my videos' the server goes bye-bye.. :(

[davezatz]

In addition to making sure it's really running as Bob mentioned above, you can also try pulling down a copy of Bonjour Browser (http://www.tildesoft.com/Files/BonjourBrowser.dmg) and make sure that the services are being advertised correctly. I seem to recall someone around here having an issue after installing 1.9.2 where TiVo Desktop tried to register the service names twice (it'd be in the logs). Deleting the preferences files (/Library/Preferences/com.tivo.desktop and /Users/yourusername/Library/Preferences/com.tivo.desktop.plist) and starting fresh solved that problem. I deleted both those files and then restarted service. No luck so I snapped this pic with Bonjour Browser - see anything strange?

http://www.zatznotfunny.com/bonjour.jpg

Try toggling off the 'Publish my video' Tab. I had the same problem. The server would be visable and then disappear. I tseems as soon as I 'Pubish my videos' the server goes bye-bye.. :(
I tried toggling on/off music and photos but don't think I tried videos. I will try that tonight.

Ahhh, the joy of pending matrimonial bliss! That's why mine has her own laptop and TiVo ;).Actually, the Mac is her seperate computer (the PC and Linux machines are mine)... but I occasionally commandeer it for projects such as this. ;)

[bedelman]

I deleted both those files and then restarted service. No luck so I snapped this pic with Bonjour Browser - see anything strange? Are the TiVo and the Macintosh on the same 192.168.1.xxx subnet? And are you sure the Mac OSX firewall isn't running (look in the Sharing preference pane and then under the Firewall tab)?

[davezatz]

Are the TiVo and the Macintosh on the same 192.168.1.xxx subnet? And are you sure the Mac OSX firewall isn't running (look in the Sharing preference pane and then under the Firewall tab)?

Yah... the entire network is 192.168.1.x. The firewall is off - I'm sure because I toggled it back and forth a few times to see if it made any difference. (And even when it was on, the TiVo ports were being allowed through.) FWIW TiVo Desktop on two Win machines are seen by TiVo.

[mikellanes]

I am having the same problem, even when forcing the ip the Tivo's tell me there is no server running, strange...

[bedelman]

Yah... the entire network is 192.168.1.x. The firewall is off - I'm sure because I toggled it back and forth a few times to see if it made any difference. (And even when it was on, the TiVo ports were being allowed through.) FWIW TiVo Desktop on two Win machines are seen by TiVo.I don't suppose you have another Macintosh on which you can run Bonjour Browser, do you? Running on the same machine doesn't help much because a machine can almost always see itself.

I do find it interesting that Bonjour Browser doesn't appear to be able to see the TiVo though -- here's how my TiVo boxes appear...

http://homepage.mac.com/bedelman/tivo_bonjour_services.jpg

Are you able to successfully ping the TiVo from the Macintosh? You can use the Network Utility found inside the Utilities folder to do this.

[mikellanes]

As for me, I ran bonjour browser on another mac and it sees all 3 services from the other mac just fine, I don't see the tivo's but as they are HDVR2's running 6.2 I don't think they have the functionality, am I correct here?

[bedelman]

As for me, I ran bonjour browser on another mac and it sees all 3 services from the other mac just fine, I don't see the tivo's but as they are HDVR2's running 6.2 I don't think they have the functionality, am I correct here?
Yup -- DirecTiVo boxes have the networking capabilities disabled at the behest of DirecTV -- but I understand there are ways. Perhaps there's something in the Underground forum here...

[mikellanes]

I have networking turned on and MRV is working, HMO used to be working for photos and music but seems to be totally broken now... im am adding tivo desktop to my laptop to see if the tivo's see that one, perhaps it is just my tower that is messed up or something screwy in my network.

[shoelzer]

I now have access to all the .tivo files I've archived over the past year. Nice! Thanks for finding this.

Those .tivo files are already decrypted, right? You're not saying that it's possible to download the encrypted video files from the web interface and then play them on the TiVo with this new feature, are you?

[rrdionne]

Those .tivo files are already decrypted, right? You're not saying that it's possible to download the encrypted video files from the web interface and then play them on the TiVo with this new feature, are you?

I was able to download a show via a web browser, place it in the TiVoShows folder and then watch it (transfer it back) on my TiVo. So, now we can at least archive shows.

+R

[Unix_Beard]

Those .tivo files are already decrypted, right? You're not saying that it's possible to download the encrypted video files from the web interface and then play them on the TiVo with this new feature, are you?

Yes, that's what I'm saying. I had a whole folder of .tivo files I downloaded via the super-duper top-secret web interface for safekeeping. Those are all now visible and playable via my Tivos. I guess that's why you enter your MAK in the pref pane.

[Unix_Beard]

bedelman has been kind enough to host this file on his iDisk
http://homepage.mac.com/bedelman/Movie2Tivo.zip

It's a simple GUI wrapper to a few open source tools.
It will convert avi files if you install the included codec. Should work with mpg to mpg conversion too.
It will even do batch encoding.

Program Limitations
It does not like file paths or file names with spaces in them or special characters.
It's a WIP beta. But it should be safe and not damage your system.

Please give me some feedback or suggestions via PM or the linked thread. Thanks!

I had some movies in Xvid format. Will this app convert those? When I tried, it beeped like 50 times and then proceeded to create two files - I assume one audio and one video.

[rog]

Nice work Dennis and Corixidae. Very nice finds.

:up:

[Dennis Wilkinson]

I've found you can enable the "Videos" tab in the TiVo Desktop preference pane merely by holding down the Command (a.k.a. "open Apple") key while you click the TiVo Desktop icon in the System Preferences window. No messing with terminal commands that way.

Also, if you hold down the Option key while you click the TiVo Desktop pref pane icon, you get a debugging/logging option.

Good catch! The logging option will save some explaining with some of the remote troubleshooting that happens around here.

FWIW, the main difference between the terminal commands method and the command key method is that if you set the VideoUIEnabled pref via the command line, the change is persistent, while with the command key method you have to do it every time. It's quite a bit simpler to explain, tho'.

[mikellanes]

Played around with this more at lunchtime and it is listed fine until I turn on the video sharing, then the server disappears immediately, not sure what's up with it. Would this be a limitation of my hardware since this is a Series 2 DirecTiVo? A better question may be; is anyone using video transfer on a HDVR2 :)

[davezatz]

I don't suppose you have another Macintosh on which you can run Bonjour Browser, do you? Running on the same machine doesn't help much because a machine can almost always see itself.

I do find it interesting that Bonjour Browser doesn't appear to be able to see the TiVo though -- here's how my TiVo boxes appear...

Are you able to successfully ping the TiVo from the Macintosh? You can use the Network Utility found inside the Utilities folder to do this.

Only one Mac, sorry. (Until the new 13" MacBook shos up next week...;)) I tried starting/stopping services a few times again mixed in with pinging the TiVo and accessing it through Firefox with no problems. That resulted in BonjourBrowser now seeing the TiVo in the video category... sadly the TiVo still sees nothing. I also tried toggling the video publishing to see if that would help, which it didn't.

This Mac has worked in the past with an older version of the TiVo Desktop. Not sure which it was... I content to let it drop since my PC is my primary TiVo machine, but if you guys are intrigued by the issue I'll be happy to try things out.

(I did try to enable logging with the option key, but I have a Kensington wireless keyboard/mouse only and it seems like I can send a signal from the keyboard OR the mouse, not both simultanously. I'm going online now to see if there is updated software that might help.)

[mikellanes]

Only one Mac, sorry. (Until the new 13" MacBook shos up next week...;)) I tried starting/stopping services a few times again mixed in with pinging the TiVo and accessing it through Firefox with no problems. That resulted in BonjourBrowser now seeing the TiVo in the video category... sadly the TiVo still sees nothing. I also tried toggling the video publishing to see if that would help, which it didn't.

This Mac has worked in the past with an older version of the TiVo Desktop. Not sure which it was... I content to let it drop since my PC is my primary TiVo machine, but if you guys are intrigued by the issue I'll be happy to try things out.

(I did try to enable logging with the option key, but I have a Kensington wireless keyboard/mouse only and it seems like I can send a signal from the keyboard OR the mouse, not both simultanously. I'm going online now to see if there is updated software that might help.)

What model tivo is this? Is the video sharing working on the PC? When you turn off video does the server pop back on the tivo?

[davezatz]

What model tivo is this? Is the video sharing working on the PC? When you turn off video does the server pop back on the tivo?

The only one I have hooked up at the moment is a Humax DVD-burning S2. Works fine as expected with PC (I've also turned it off to make sure there's no conflict). I've tried toggling video publishing and at no time does the Mac appear in Photos & Music or Now Playing. This behavior isn't unique to 1.9.3 - it hasn't worked in awhile.

FYI I updated my wireless keyboard/mouse software and I can option-click now! :)

Here's my log... Am I missing anything? I see some Java weirdness. There's a few more lines after this about not being able to convert protected AAC, but that's all there is! (FYI this is 10.3.9 fully patched, firewall off, personal and windows file sharing on, can ping TiVo.).

16:16:52.885 Starting TiVoDesktop version 1.9.3 (008)
16:16:52.956 PluginLoader.load: loading 4 plugins from /Library/Application Support/TiVo/Plugins
16:16:52.973 com.tivo.filephoto.FilePhotoFactory: adding observer
16:16:52.978 PluginLoader.loadFile: loaded plugin with name FilePhoto
16:16:52.988 com.tivo.filevideo.FileVideoFactory: adding observer
16:16:52.990 PluginLoader.loadFile: loaded plugin with name FileVideo
16:16:52.997 com.tivo.iPhoto.iPhotoFactory: adding observer
16:16:52.999 PluginLoader.loadFile: loaded plugin with name iPhoto
16:16:53.008 com.tivo.iTunes.iTunesFactory: adding observer
16:16:53.010 PluginLoader.loadFile: loaded plugin with name iTunes
16:16:53.026 FilePhotoFactory: about to create new root for user davezatz
16:16:53.199 FilePhotoFactory: exception creating new root
java.lang.Exception: User davezatz does not have preferences for plugin FilePhoto
at com.tivo.plugin.AbstractPluginRoot.readPrefsAndUpdate(Abstra ctPluginRoot.java:84)
at com.tivo.plugin.AbstractPluginRoot.<init>(AbstractPluginRoot.java:52)
at com.tivo.filephoto.FilePhotoRoot.<init>(FilePhotoRoot.java:34)
at com.tivo.filephoto.FilePhotoFactory.makePluginForUser(FilePh otoFactory.java:27)
at com.tivo.plugin.AbstractPluginFactory.addPluginForUser(Abstr actPluginFactory.java:72)
at com.tivo.plugin.AbstractPluginFactory.usersChanged(AbstractP luginFactory.java:103)
at com.tivo.calypso.Root.build(Root.java:104)
at com.tivo.calypso.Root.<init>(Root.java:63)
at com.tivo.calypso.Root.getRoot(Root.java:32)
at com.tivo.server.TiVoDesktop.main(TiVoDesktop.java:67)
16:16:53.202 FileVideoFactory: about to create new root for user davezatz
16:16:53.228 Root.getAnnouncerForNode(tn) -> com.tivo.filevideo.FileVideoRoot
16:16:53.229 minorType = tivo-videos
16:16:53.235 TiVoDesktop: successful announcement of: name=Dave, type=_tivo-videos._tcp, port=8101, path=/TiVoConnect?Command=QueryContainer&Container=%2fdavezatz_FileVideo, protocol=http
16:16:53.395 iPhotoFactory: about to create new root for user davezatz
16:16:53.403 Root.getAnnouncerForNode(tn) -> com.tivo.iPhoto.iPhotoRoot
16:16:53.403 minorType = tivo-photos
16:16:53.405 TiVoDesktop: successful announcement of: name=Mac Photos, type=_tivo-photos._tcp, port=8101, path=/TiVoConnect?Command=QueryContainer&Container=%2fdavezatz_iPhoto, protocol=http
16:16:53.548 iPhotoRoot.loadFromFile: Reading album data for version 5.0.4 (263)
16:16:54.306 iTunesFactory: about to create new root for user davezatz
16:16:54.318 Root.getAnnouncerForNode(tn) -> com.tivo.iTunes.iTunesRoot
16:16:54.318 minorType = tivo-music
16:16:54.320 TiVoDesktop: successful announcement of: name=Mac Music, type=_tivo-music._tcp, port=8101, path=/TiVoConnect?Command=QueryContainer&Container=%2fdavezatz_iTunes, protocol=http
16:16:55.045 iTunesRoot: Reading album data for version 4.9

[Dennis Wilkinson]

Here's my log... Am I missing anything? I see some Java weirdness. There's a few more lines after this about not being able to convert protected AAC, but that's all there is! (FYI this is 10.3.9 fully patched, firewall off, personal and windows file sharing on, can ping TiVo.).

I think Bob may be on to something with the fact that the TiVos themselves don't show up in Bonjour Browser. Mine certainly do. That makes me think that perhaps the TiVo hasn't got it's Bonjour implementation active (IIRC, that doesn't impact the Windows version.) I suppose you could try rebooting the TiVo.

I remember several versions ago, TiVo-software-wise, where the TiVo would sporadically not see my Mac, unless I went to the Music & Photos screen and just let it stay there for some arbitrary span of time, usually less than 5-10 minutes. Then things would just magically reconnect, for no reason I could fathom (I suppose I could have fired up Ethereal, but it wasn't a common enough thing for me to dig further.)

What are you using for a network adapter on the TiVo?

[davezatz]

I think Bob may be on to something with the fact that the TiVos themselves don't show up in Bonjour Browser. Mine certainly do. That makes me think that perhaps the TiVo hasn't got it's Bonjour implementation active (IIRC, that doesn't impact the Windows version.) I suppose you could try rebooting the TiVo.

I remember several versions ago, TiVo-software-wise, where the TiVo would sporadically not see my Mac, unless I went to the Music & Photos screen and just let it stay there for some arbitrary span of time, usually less than 5-10 minutes. Then things would just magically reconnect, for no reason I could fathom (I suppose I could have fired up Ethereal, but it wasn't a common enough thing for me to dig further.)

What are you using for a network adapter on the TiVo?

Twice now I've seen my TiVo magically show up in Bonjour Browser for just a split second, once when I rebooted my TiVo. But then it vanished again. Sitting on Music & Photos for 10 minutes didn't produce anything. The last time I remember this working was probably 2 software revs ago on a different TiVo with a different adapter (HD-S400, Netgear 111). That's also when it seemed to have stopped working. The current TiVo has the latest iteration of the Linksys USB -> Ethernet dongle networked to a Buffalo wireless bridge that the Slingbox also uses. Are there some logs I should look for on the Mac for clues?

[FlyingRev]

I am trying to login to my Tivo using Safari (for the Mac - MacBook Pro 2.16) and it is asking me for my login and Password. I do not remember setting one up. Any suggestions??

I am typing in: 10.0.1.4/nowplaying/index.html in the web browser. Then it asks for a l/p.

Thanks for your help.

[davezatz]

I am trying to login to my Tivo using Safari (for the Mac - MacBook Pro 2.16) and it is asking me for my login and Password. I do not remember setting one up. Any suggestions??

I am typing in: 10.0.1.4/nowplaying/index.html in the web browser. Then it asks for a l/p.

Thanks for your help.

Username is tivo, password is your Media Access Key which you can get online by managing your TiVo.com account. You can also just type https://10.0.1.4 and skip the other stuff.

[Unix_Beard]

I am trying to login to my Tivo using Safari (for the Mac - MacBook Pro 2.16) and it is asking me for my login and Password. I do not remember setting one up. Any suggestions??

I am typing in: 10.0.1.4/nowplaying/index.html in the web browser. Then it asks for a l/p.

Thanks for your help.

You have to login using the httpS:// url:

https://dvr.local./nowplaying/index.html

And then the username is "tivo" and the password is your Media Access Key which you get on the Tivo website.

[dubious]

I am trying to login to my Tivo using Safari (for the Mac - MacBook Pro 2.16) and it is asking me for my login and Password. I do not remember setting one up. Any suggestions??

I am typing in: 10.0.1.4/nowplaying/index.html in the web browser. Then it asks for a l/p.

Thanks for your help.


try logging in this way
https://dvr-14dd.local./nowplaying/index.html

the login is tivo (I think)

[srgoldman]

1. Followed the directions. Checked with Bonjour Browser and the log. Everything appears to be published correctly but the Video isn't being displayed as an option on my Tivo.
2. I did discover the FilePhoto plugin though and can now view my photos (I don't use iPhoto). So some good came out of this.
3. I've also been unable to get the AAC files to play (unprotected ones) and I installed the latest version of LAME.

Can anyone shed some light? I'd love to get both the AAC streaming and Video working.

[dubious]

My mac is visible in NPL on my tivo (series 2). I put a .Tivo file that I had uploaded to archive in the TivoShows folder. However, the first message I got was that there were no movies in the folder, and then I rebooted my mac and now the message is that there is an unknown problem. Any ideas?

[Dennis Wilkinson]

Twice now I've seen my TiVo magically show up in Bonjour Browser for just a split second, once when I rebooted my TiVo. But then it vanished again. Sitting on Music & Photos for 10 minutes didn't produce anything. The last time I remember this working was probably 2 software revs ago on a different TiVo with a different adapter (HD-S400, Netgear 111). That's also when it seemed to have stopped working. The current TiVo has the latest iteration of the Linksys USB -> Ethernet dongle networked to a Buffalo wireless bridge that the Slingbox also uses. Are there some logs I should look for on the Mac for clues?

Sounds like the problem might be on the TiVo side, and not on the Mac side, or potentially with the bridge (something has properly route the broadcast UDP packets used by Bonjour.) That would mean no useful logs on the Mac.

I suppose you could try to eliminate the TiVo by connecting it directly to the Mac (almost all recent Macs have ports that automatically switch to crossover as needed, so you should be able to use any old Ethernet cable to test.)

I'm using a combination of NetGear, Linksys, and one TiVo adapter, with various Linksys switches and wireless devices, and I can see my Mac from all 3 TiVos currently in my living room.

[bedelman]

try logging in this way
https://dvr-14dd.local./nowplaying/index.html

the login is tivo (I think)
Any of those ".local." URLs are Rendezvous/Bonjour based URLs -- and the four characters between dvr-XXXX.local. (where the X's are) are the last four characters of the TiVo Service Number of your TiVo.

[FlyingRev]

Thank you very much for your help! I sincerely appreciate it. :)

[Dennis Wilkinson]

I edited my original post with the instructions to add a quickie downloadable AppleScript applet that will toggle the appropriate settings without having to use the command line. It's a quickie, and should work on 10.3.x and higher with TiVo Desktop 1.9.3 installed, but it does no version checking, nor have I tested it on anything other than my config (10.4.5 with 1.9.3).

Usual disclaimers apply.

[rhust]

A little help please
I have enabled video. Check in the terminal to see that new setting are in effect. I have put several .mpg files in my TiVoShows folder. MyMac and the .mpg files show in Now Playing, BUT
When I try to play a file, I get the following error:
"Problem transfering program to DVR. Check Programs to Record.... View History......The message there is "Not transfered because not found on FastEddie (Randy Hust)"
Photos and Tunes are found just fine.
Any thoughts?

Randy

[bedelman]

A little help please
I have enabled video. Check in the terminal to see that new setting are in effect. I have put several .mpg files in my TiVoShows folder. MyMac and the .mpg files show in Now Playing, BUT
When I try to play a file, I get the following error:
"Problem transfering program to DVR. Check Programs to Record.... View History......The message there is "Not transfered because not found on FastEddie (Randy Hust)"
Photos and Tunes are found just fine.
Any thoughts?

Randy
Are there any interesting characters in the file name of the .mpg file? Does it help if you adjust the file name? After changing the file name, you can either wait for a refresh or stop/start TiVo Desktop to force it to refresh the list.

[rhust]

Are there any interesting characters in the file name of the .mpg file? Does it help if you adjust the file name? After changing the file name, you can either wait for a refresh or stop/start TiVo Desktop to force it to refresh the list.
Thanks Bob
Good thought but no funny characters. intro.mpg is the name of the file.
I am using my media access key.
One thing that is different in the tivo desktop pane is the name field
For Music and Photos: Randy Hust's Music on FastEddie or Randy Hust's Photos on FastEddie
For Video: FastEddie (Randy Hust)
Could that have anything to do with it?
FastEddie is the comuter name set in Sharing.

Randy

[mcreston]

I was able to download a show via a web browser, place it in the TiVoShows folder and then watch it (transfer it back) on my TiVo. So, now we can at least archive shows.

+R

how exactly did you download the file from the browser? I am very interested. thanks

[Dennis Wilkinson]

how exactly did you download the file from the browser? I am very interested. thanks

This is pretty simple if you include Bonjour sites in your Bookmarks menu or Bookmarks bar in Safari. Your TiVos will show up there, and will have a URL that looks like:

http://dvr-a1b1.local./index.html

Go to the Bonjour bookmark, then just change the "http" to "https". When prompted for username and password, use "tivo" as the username (no quotes) and our Media Access Key as the password. You'll see your now playing list, and will be able to download shows.

What you really need is your TiVo's internet address (which is really what you're getting from Bonjour.) So, any URL of the form:

https://yourtivosip/index.html

would work.

[electricbob]

Not working for me. I installed a LAME build of 3.97b2 I found on the net.

When I try to play an AAC file, I get this stack trace in the Console for SocketException for a broken pipe. (I'd like to put the stack trace here but the antispam filter won't allow it) Oh, and I get static on the TiVO and the right length for the song.

When I stop the server, I then get:

LAME: Can't get "TERM" environment string.
Error writing mp3 output

Any ideas on what to do?

And BTW, thanks for the preferences delete suggestion, as I had multiple assignments of ports and that fixed it for me.

I'm going to try converting a video and see if that will work - very cool!

Any help appreciated! - Bob

[AquaX]

Has anyone had any luck with AAC decoding with LAME?

All I get is static when I try to play an AAC when I compiled LAME from scratch.

[half.italian]

Here's an easy little tool for converting video to put on your tivo. It's just a wrapper around the ffmpeg command line tool, but gives you video that works on your tivo every time.

Installation:
1. Download and install ffmpegx and the needed binaries. (mencoder, mplayer, mpeg2enc)
2. Make sure to put the ffmpeg app directly in your Applications folder (the path to this is harcoded in for now)
3. Download and unzip "TiVoizer" and run it

Running it:
1. Choose a source file you want to convert for your tivo
2. Choose the destination directory and name the file (This directory should be one that Tivo sees for Goback files. See above.)
3. Set the size and bitrate
4. Tivoize

I made it quick and dirty so people could use it right away. There's lots of stuff I could add to it to make it easier and better. ie log, queue of files to convert, more options, adding black bars rather than stretching, destination folder set in prefs, run in deamon mode to watch a specific folder and convert anything added...etc

Let me know if it works for you.

Tested on 2 ppc ibooks running 10.4.6

[TydalForce]

A plain and simple utility! Awesome!

I can't try out the converted video until monday - I'm a bit away from home at the moment.

Mind a little feedback?

- I'd love it if the "Destination" somehow defaulted to the original filename (maybe drop out special characters and tack on .mpg ?), and could default to a pre-designated folder
- Can you add a progress bar or some other meter?

[mckingsley]

Thanks for making this program. However I would like to see things go a step further. For example, you still must install ffmpegx and get it all set up with the binaries, that is the part that is the most pain anyways. Not that it's hard, but still not up to par for the average user.

Anyways once you have ffmpegx installed, it's pretty much just as easy to use the preset script that is floating around that (cwoody) has and do it directly in ffmpegx.

It would be great to see it become a program like isquint where it is all contained within the program. Just my 2 cents, I'm not a programmer, so I don't know how feasble this is.

[half.italian]

Thanks. I'll work on it tonite and see what I can come up with.

[mckingsley]

Now that many of us are finding easier ways to upload avi (or whatever) files converted to mpeg2 to the tivo, what about DVD's? Has someone found a good way to do this.
I know you can use Mac The Ripper to decode.

But after that:

- Handbreak will just convert to mpeg4 format.
- The cwoody script does not seem to work with converting Video_TS files directly to the needed mpeg2 format.

The only options I see right now are:

- use ffmpegx to first convert the Video_TS to avi in ffmpegx- then go from avi to mpeg2 in ffmpegx

- or -

- use handbreak to first convert the Video_TS to mpeg4, then use ffmpegx to convert to mpeg2.

Both are a two step process.

[Dennis Wilkinson]

Has anyone had any luck with AAC decoding with LAME?

It's working for me on a PowerMac G4. I don't have an Intel Mac to test with here. I would expect it to behave, although I suppose if you're hand-building LAME and the source code isn't aware of the difference in processor-endianness you could get static as described. (I've seen lots of code that just assumes Mac OS == big endian, which is no longer universally true. Haven't looked at LAME, though.)

I'm using a built version of LAME 3.96.1 from here:

http://www.vastheman.com/download/macos10/lame_3.96.1_lite.dmg

I believe that a PowerPC version of LAME would work on an Intel Mac, FWIW, since it runs as a separate process and not as a loadable module. Don't know about performance, though.

[Dennis Wilkinson]

Now that many of us are finding easier ways to upload avi (or whatever) files converted to mpeg2 to the tivo, what about DVD's? Has someone found a good way to do this.
I know you can use Mac The Ripper to decode.

Some people have reported on the PC that simply renaming the .vob to .mpg works, but if I read TiVo's page on supported MPEG formats that would only work for those with TiVo/DVD combos.

I've had mixed success in getting ffmpegX (and the underlying tools at the command line) to demux the VOB file, reencode the audio to MPEG-1 Layer 2, then remux the video and audio, but remuxing seems to run into problems. It's pretty straightforward with ffmpegX to go from VOB to a compatible MPEG format so long as you're willing to recompress the video, but that seems like a massive waste of time to me.

I've futzed around in the Handbrake source a bit in the past -- most of the structure is there, although .mp2 encoding and MPEG-2 muxing would need to be added.

[half.italian]

testing mencoder DVD to mpeg2 as we speak....its very slow

[half.italian]

This command is converting from DVD direct to mpg readable by tivo.

/Applications/ffmpeg/mencoder dvd://1 -oac lavc -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vrc_buf_size=1835:vrc_maxrate=8000:vbitrat e=5000:keyint=18:acodec=mp2 -ofps 24/1.001 -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd -vf scale=720:480 -o filename.mpg

but i'm getting a wierd drop-frame type effect when viewed on the Tivo. Anybody have suggestions on getting rid of that? Seems like it would have to do with the frame rate, but I've messed around a bunch.

[bedelman]

I've used MPEG Streamclip to convert from a DVD to an MPEG-2 file. It might need to have the Quicktime MPEG-2 codec though, but it works fairly quickly on a dual 1GHz PowerMac G4.

[bedelman]

Thanks Bob
Good thought but no funny characters. intro.mpg is the name of the file.
I am using my media access key.
One thing that is different in the tivo desktop pane is the name field
For Music and Photos: Randy Hust's Music on FastEddie or Randy Hust's Photos on FastEddie
For Video: FastEddie (Randy Hust)
Could that have anything to do with it?
FastEddie is the comuter name set in Sharing.

Randy
The entry that shows in the Now Playing list is the computer name with the user name in parenthesis. It doesn't look like anything is amiss as long as the .mpg file adheres to the TiVo MPEG-2 requirements

Transferring Personal Video from PC to TiVo DVR (http://customersupport.tivo.com/knowbase/root/public/tv251080.htm)

[mckingsley]

I've used MPEG Streamclip to convert from a DVD to an MPEG-2 file. It might need to have the Quicktime MPEG-2 codec though, but it works fairly quickly on a dual 1GHz PowerMac G4.


Ok, I tried this method and it actually works really well for a straight across conversion. It is very fast and worked perfectly uploading to my tivo.

If you do not have the Apple Mpeg2 codec, it will not play (preview) on the computer but you don't need that to just convert to the needed MPEG with MP2 audio. You can play the file with VLC anyway if you want to test it.

The only thing is it does not allow for is any downconverting so it results in a very large, high quality file as the only option.

[half.italian]

I found a very simple way to convert DVD's directly to a format Tivo can see. Only works with standard 4:3 encoded movies.

1. Download mplayer from http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/mplayerosx/ffmpegXbinaries20060307.zip and unzip and copy to /Applications or wherever
2. Open terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal)
3. in terminal type /Applications/mplayer dvd:// -dumpstream -dumpfile /Users/george/Desktop/filename.mpg (replace filename with correct path and name)
4. Wait for it to finish

The file should be an exact copy of the DVD. The file size is large, but the speed is realtime I believe, and in messing around with compressing DVD's on the fly tonite, I found the quality poor and problems common. This process doesn't work with DVD's encoded as 16:9 because the size is not one that tivo supports 720x404.

[jmelloy]

It's working for me on a PowerMac G4. I don't have an Intel Mac to test with here. I would expect it to behave, although I suppose if you're hand-building LAME and the source code isn't aware of the difference in processor-endianness you could get static as described. (I've seen lots of code that just assumes Mac OS == big endian, which is no longer universally true. Haven't looked at LAME, though.)


I'm unable to get this to work, too. I tried both a universal lame binary and the one from that website.

[Dennis Wilkinson]

This process doesn't work with DVD's encoded as 16:9 because the size is not one that tivo supports 720x404.

That's not really the case, unless mplayer is flagging it incorrectly. 16:9 DVDs and 4:3 DVDs have exactly the same number of pixels (usu. 720x480). The only difference is the shape the pixels are supposed to be displayed at.

[Dennis Wilkinson]

I'm unable to get this to work, too. I tried both a universal lame binary and the one from that website.

It may be that TiVo Desktop's unsupported AAC transcode is getting the endianness wrong on Intel Macs, and not LAME's. If that's the case, you could try doing this:

- install a LAME distro (preferably universal)

- run the following from the command line:
sudo mv /usr/local/bin/lame /usr/local/bin/reallame

- create a file in a text editor with the following contents:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/local/bin/reallame -x $*

and save it to your home directory as a file named lame.txt

- run the following from the command line

sudo mv ~/lame.txt /usr/local/bin/lame
sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/lame


This is completely untested by me, but what it should do is call LAME with forced byteswapping when invoked by TiVo Desktop. So, if the uncompressed data that TiVo Desktop feeds to LAME is in the wrong byte order, this should correct it on the way in. There shouldn't be anything to worry about on the output side.

If this works for you, please post. I can wrap that up as an applet pretty quickly, for those who aren't command-line-comfy.

[Unix_Beard]

Can someone tell me the general settings for the export mpg for ffmpegX? I used the Tivoizer utility but for widescreen movies, it stretches it vertically.

[half.italian]

Try this version of Tivoizer. Use the check box for 16:9 I think I got the numbers right...

[jmelloy]

It may be that TiVo Desktop's unsupported AAC transcode is getting the endianness wrong on Intel Macs, and not LAME's. If that's the case, you could try doing this:

This is completely untested by me, but what it should do is call LAME with forced byteswapping when invoked by TiVo Desktop. So, if the uncompressed data that TiVo Desktop feeds to LAME is in the wrong byte order, this should correct it on the way in. There shouldn't be anything to worry about on the output side.

If this works for you, please post. I can wrap that up as an applet pretty quickly, for those who aren't command-line-comfy.

Works perfectly. You're a genius.

So ... if I'm understanding this process correctly, TiVoDesktop converts AAC to WAV and then calls lame to convert to MP3? It seems like there's an extra, unncessary step in there.

[Unix_Beard]

Works perfectly. You're a genius.

So ... if I'm understanding this process correctly, TiVoDesktop converts AAC to WAV and then calls lame to convert to MP3? It seems like there's an extra, unncessary step in there.

Yeah, a second lossy conversion.

[Dennis Wilkinson]

Works perfectly. You're a genius.

So ... if I'm understanding this process correctly, TiVoDesktop converts AAC to WAV and then calls lame to convert to MP3? It seems like there's an extra, unncessary step in there.

More accurately, it decompresses the AAC, then recompresses as MP3 and ships that to the hardware (which only understands MP3.) There's intermediate data there, but it's (a) uncompressed and (b) transient.

Yes, it's an extra, lossy step, but since the TiVo only understands MP3, there's not much you can do about it.

I'll take a few moments tonight and put together a little applet that will make those changes, but it'll have to wait until the kids are asleep (getting a brief respite from snacktime and Clifford at the moment...)

[srgoldman]

I'd paste in my log but apparently I haven't posted enough. I can provide it separately if someone would be willing to take a look. Here's what I think is relevant:

SoundConverter is called with my user name the the full filename of the .m4a file.
The convert method on SoundConverter gets an EOF on the pipe and exits gracefully.

How can I figure out what is causing the EOF for SoundConverter?

I'm running on a Dual G5, latest iTunes and OSX. I built LAME myself and verified that it is installed in /usr/local/bin/lame with appropriate protections. Help?

[Dennis Wilkinson]

SoundConverter is called with my user name the the full filename of the .m4a file.
The convert method on SoundConverter gets an EOF on the pipe and exits gracefully.

How can I figure out what is causing the EOF for SoundConverter?

By SoundConverter, do you mean the SoundConvert application in /Libary/Application Support/TiVo? Depending on how TiVo is using the QuickTime SoundConverter APIs, that EOF is most likely coming from some other TiVo function. Is the convert method called at all prior to the EOF?

Might be able to help with a bit more detail.

[Dennis Wilkinson]

I'll take a few moments tonight and put together a little applet that will make those changes

And here it is. Again, it's a toggle, so the first run applies the hack, the second will remove it. Just a little AppleScript applet that calls into the shell to do its voodoo.

Hardly extensively tested, so like anything else, use at your own risk.

[funkdaddy]

Has anyone had any luck with AAC decoding with LAME?

All I get is static when I try to play an AAC when I compiled LAME from scratch.

It works on mine, I used the package found here: http://www.culater.net/software.php

This new version of TD has been acting weird... my internet was out for a day and I couldn't access audio, video or photos.. just hangs on the "please wait" screen. Today internet is back and it works, not as nice as the older version did, but it works... does it require an internet connection to work for some reason?

[Dan203]

Do you have any playlists that include internet content? Like internet radio streams? Could be that's hanging it up.

Dan

[davezatz]

Sounds like the problem might be on the TiVo side, and not on the Mac side, or potentially with the bridge (something has properly route the broadcast UDP packets used by Bonjour.)

I suppose you could try to eliminate the TiVo by connecting it directly to the Mac (almost all recent Macs have ports that automatically switch to crossover as needed, so you should be able to use any old Ethernet cable to test.)

I've been loaning one of my buddies a TiVo and a wireless adapter the last few months... so I asked him if I could borrow back the wireless adapter for a night to experiment. You and Bob were on the money - by taking the wireless bridge out of the equation everything is functioning as expected using a Netgear MA111. :)

(Uncabling and moving the bedroom TiVo to the kitchen (and back) where the Mac lives just didn't seem like a fun project which is why I ended up with a different adapter for testing.)

[Dennis Wilkinson]

It works on mine, I used the package found here: http://www.culater.net/software.php

This new version of TD has been acting weird... my internet was out for a day and I couldn't access audio, video or photos.. just hangs on the "please wait" screen. Today internet is back and it works, not as nice as the older version did, but it works... does it require an internet connection to work for some reason?

People hearing static are almost certainly on Intel Macs and should grab the script I posted a few posts ago.

Your problem might be streaming content in a playlist as Dan suggests, but it's not really clear. I don't know that I've ever tried it when fully disconnected, but it is supposed to work in that case. If your TiVo gets its IP address from a DHCP server at your ISP (man, that's a lot of acronyms) then I can see how things could potentially misbehave , though.

[burbanknate]

I did discover the FilePhoto plugin though and can now view my photos (I don't use iPhoto). So some good came out of this.

Umm, HOW?

I've ever ever gotten Photos to work on my TiVo.
Ever ever.

I'm now running TiVo Desktop 1.9.3 for Mac,
OS 10.4.6.

I can see my photos as an option in "Music Photos and More"
but when I select it it says an error occurred.

What's this filephoto.plugin and how does it work?

[Dennis Wilkinson]

I've ever ever gotten Photos to work on my TiVo.
Ever ever.

I'm now running TiVo Desktop 1.9.3 for Mac,
OS 10.4.6.

What version of iPhoto? You need to be on at least iPhoto 5.

What error do you get?

Have you tried repairing your iPhoto database? (Instructions are here (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107947))

There's also some logging that you can turn on that may help diagnose the issue.

What's this filephoto.plugin and how does it work?

It's unsupported, but just happens to be installed by default, like the FileVideo.plugin.

It's in /Library/Application Support/TiVo/Plugins (with the other plugins) and as far as I can see, it has no UI. Turning it on is straightforward, so long as you don't mind the command line. Stop the TiVo Desktop server, close System Preferences, then open Terminal.app (in Applications/Utilities), and enter the following at the prompt:


plutil -convert xml1 ~/Library/Preferences/com.tivo.desktop.plist
open -a TextEdit.app ~/Library/Preferences/com.tivo.desktop.plist

That will convert the TiVo prefs file to text, then open it in TextEdit.

After the first line that reads "<dict>", insert the following text:


<key>FilePhoto</key>
<dict>
<key>Enabled</key>
<true/>
<key>ShareAll</key>
<true/>
<key>SharedItems</key>
<array>
<string>FullPathToYourPhotos</string>
</array>
<key>SharingName</key>
<string>YourShareName</string>
</dict>

replacing the "FullPathToYourPhotos" to, well, the full path to your photos, and "YourShareName" with whatever you'd like to see it called on your TiVo. If you don't know what the full path is, just drag the folder with your pictures in it to the terminal window, and the full path will be inserted for you to copy & paste.

The file is XML, and you can add multiple folders by inserting more paths wrapped in <string></string> tags inside that pair of <array></array> tags.

I would probably make a backup copy of the prefs file before you get started, but if you should mess something up, deleting the file and re-opening and closing the TiVo Desktop pref pane will create a legal one.

Save the text file, and restart TiVo Desktop. You should see any photos (looks like .jpg/.jpeg, .tiff, .pct, and .bmp are supported).

All that said, if you can get iPhoto working, that's usually a better choice, especially since it's actually supported.

[burbanknate]

I installed Tivo Desktop 1.9.3 and iPhoto 5 today.
I had previously used iPhoto 2.
My photo library was automatically rebuilt when I installed iPhoto 5 a few hours ago.

The error message I get on the TiVo is:
No photos are currently being shared on (my computer), or a network problem is preventing you from accessing shared photos there. Use the Tivo Desktop software on your computer to share photo files with the TiVo DVR, and check your newtork connection.

Of course my network connection is fine, Music Sharing works fine.

I'm now downloading an update for iPhoto and I will test then.
After that... maybe I'll give the ol' Terminal a whirl.

[Dennis Wilkinson]

After that... maybe I'll give the ol' Terminal a whirl.

Before you do that, there's another troubleshooting step you can take.

Open System Preferences, then option-click on the TiVo Desktop pref pane. It will open with some logging options down at the bottom. Turn on logging, and set the level to 20 (the maximum). Restart the TiVo Desktop server, and try accessing photos from your TiVo.

Provided you don't change the path for the log, this will create a file in /Library/Logs named TiVoDesktop.log. Pop it open in a text editor and see if there are any more errors or odd messages related to photos in there. That might help diagnose the problem.

[burbanknate]

Ok, did as you said...
Tried accessing the photos from my TiVo.

The error message I got this time on the TiVo
(the one I've been seeing for 6 months) is:

An unexpected error occured while acceessing the server.
(Error#0-65535)

My log file is huge. The first part is a list of my iTunes Library, so I'll skip it.

07:59:25.524 FilePoller: checking file /Library/Preferences/com.tivo.desktop with multiple 1
07:59:40.524 FilePoller: checking file /Library/Preferences/com.tivo.desktop with multiple 1
07:59:55.524 FilePoller: checking file /Library/Preferences/com.tivo.desktop with multiple 1
08:00:10.525 FilePoller: checking file /Library/Preferences/com.tivo.desktop with multiple 1
08:00:25.525 FilePoller: checking file /Library/Preferences/com.tivo.desktop with multiple 1
08:00:34.379 HTTPServer.run: got new request
08:00:34.414 HTTPServer: New connection from xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
08:00:34.440 URL: /TiVoConnect?Command=QueryContainer&Container=%2Froot_iTunes&Recurse=No&Filter=x-container%2Ffolder,x-container%2Fplaylist,audio%2F*&SortOrder=Type,Title&ItemCount=0&Details=Basic&Format=text%2Fxml
08:00:34.440 URL Base: /TiVoConnect
08:00:34.440 URL Parameters:
08:00:34.440 Container: /root_iTunes
08:00:34.441 Details: Basic
08:00:34.441 Filter: x-container/folder,x-container/playlist,audio/*
08:00:34.441 Recurse: No
08:00:34.441 Format: text/xml
08:00:34.441 SortOrder: Type,Title
08:00:34.441 Command: QueryContainer
08:00:34.442 ItemCount: 0
08:00:34.448 HTTPServer.itemize: level 0 with 4 items
08:00:34.448 HTTPServer.itemize: level 0 state 1 checking item at 0 with path: root_iPhoto
08:00:34.448 HTTPServer.itemize: checking path element root_iTunes against item root_iPhoto
08:00:34.448 HTTPServer.itemize: level 0 state 1 checking item at 1 with path: nathanalexander_iPhoto
08:00:34.448 HTTPServer.itemize: checking path element root_iTunes against item nathanalexander_iPhoto
08:00:34.448 HTTPServer.itemize: level 0 state 1 checking item at 2 with path: root_iTunes
08:00:34.448 HTTPServer.itemize: checking path element root_iTunes against item root_iTunes
08:00:34.448 HTTPServer.itemize: descending on path root_iTunes
08:00:37.480 HTTPServer.run: got new request
08:00:37.497 HTTPServer: New connection from xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
08:00:37.498 URL: /TiVoConnect?Command=FlushServer
08:00:37.498 URL Base: /TiVoConnect
08:00:37.498 URL Parameters:
08:00:37.498 Command: FlushServer
08:00:40.526 FilePoller: checking file /Library/Preferences/com.tivo.desktop with multiple 1
08:00:40.526 FilePoller: checking file /Users/nathanalexander/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml with multiple 6
08:00:41.534 HTTPServer.run: got new request
08:00:41.535 HTTPServer: New connection from xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
08:00:41.548 URL: /TiVoConnect?Command=QueryContainer&Container=%2Froot_iPhoto&Recurse=No&Filter=x-container%2Ffolder,image%2F*&SortOrder=Type,CaptureDate&ItemCount=0&Details=Basic&Format=text%2Fxml
08:00:41.548 URL Base: /TiVoConnect
08:00:41.548 URL Parameters:
08:00:41.548 Container: /root_iPhoto
08:00:41.548 Details: Basic
08:00:41.548 Filter: x-container/folder,image/*
08:00:41.548 Recurse: No
08:00:41.548 Format: text/xml
08:00:41.549 SortOrder: Type,CaptureDate
08:00:41.549 Command: QueryContainer
08:00:41.549 ItemCount: 0
08:00:41.549 HTTPServer.itemize: level 0 with 4 items
08:00:41.549 HTTPServer.itemize: level 0 state 1 checking item at 0 with path: root_iPhoto
08:00:41.549 HTTPServer.itemize: checking path element root_iPhoto against item root_iPhoto
08:00:41.549 HTTPServer.itemize: descending on path root_iPhoto
08:00:43.019 HTTPServer.run: got new request
08:00:43.019 HTTPServer: New connection from xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
08:00:43.028 URL: /TiVoConnect?Command=FlushServer
08:00:43.028 URL Base: /TiVoConnect
08:00:43.028 URL Parameters:
08:00:43.028 Command: FlushServer

I'm going to delete my prefs and start again.

[Dennis Wilkinson]

Somewhere near the beginning of the log, you should see something like:


13:50:57.210 iPhotoFactory: about to create new root for user dennis
13:50:57.214 TiVoDesktopPrefs.userHasPluginPrefs: creating for user: dennis and plugin: iPhoto
13:50:57.216 com.tivo.iPhoto.iPhotoRoot(dennis): adding observer
13:50:57.219 Root.getAnnouncerForNode(tn) -> com.tivo.iPhoto.iPhotoRoot
13:50:57.219 minorType = tivo-photos
13:50:57.219 Announcer: new Announcer for type _tivo-photos._tcp with name Dennis Photos (Office Mac) and port 0 and protoocol null and path /TiVoConnect?Command=QueryCon
tainer&Container=%2fdennis_iPhoto
13:50:57.220 Starting bonjour for service Dennis Photos (Office Mac) and type _tivo-photos._tcp
13:50:57.222 Announcer.run: Started Bonjour for service Dennis Photos (Office Mac) and type _tivo-photos._tcp
13:50:57.223 TiVoDesktop: successful announcement of: name=Dennis Photos (Office Mac), type=_tivo-photos._tcp, port=8101, path=/TiVoConnect?Command=QueryContainer&Contain
er=%2fdennis_iPhoto, protocol=http
13:50:57.223 iPhotoRoot: finding an iPhoto file...
13:50:57.230 iTunesUser.findiTunesFile: Checking location /Users/dennis/Pictures/iPhoto Library/AlbumData.xml
13:50:57.230 iPhotoRoot: found iPhoto file /Users/dennis/Pictures/iPhoto Library/AlbumData.xml
13:50:57.233 iPhotoRoot: Reading iPhoto data from file /Users/dennis/Pictures/iPhoto Library/AlbumData.xml
13:50:57.758 iPhotoRoot.loadFromFile: Reading album data for version 5.0.4 (263)


Followed by top-level albums in your iPhoto database, then something like:


13:51:03.161 iPhotoRoot.loadFromFile: done reading iPhoto data
13:51:03.162 FilePoller: new, interval 120000 for file /Users/dennis/Pictures/iPhoto Library/AlbumData.xml
13:51:03.162 FilePoller: new minInterval is 15000
13:51:03.162 iPhotoRoot: new user id: 1 name: Dennis Photos (Office Mac)


I'd look for errors reported in there to start.

You should also edit your post - the lines containing "HTTPServer: New connection from " include your TSN.

Your log looks OK, right up until the lines referring to FlushServer -- the iPhoto plugin doesn't descend into any albums.

You've really got this installed for an enabled root user?

[bedelman]

And you can force a rebuild of the iPhoto library (as well as other options) by holding down both the option and apple keys while iPhoto is starting up.

[burbanknate]

09:23:35.387 TiVoDesktopPrefs.userHasPluginPrefs: creating for user: nathanalexander and plugin: iPhoto
09:23:35.389 com.tivo.iPhoto.iPhotoRoot(nathanalexander): adding observer
09:23:35.402 Root.getAnnouncerForNode(tn) -> com.tivo.iPhoto.iPhotoRoot
09:23:35.403 minorType = tivo-photos
09:23:35.407 Announcer: new Announcer for type _tivo-photos._tcp with name Nathan Alexander's Photos on Nathan Alexander's Computer and port 0 and protoocol null and path /TiVoConnect?Command=QueryContainer&Container=%2fnathanalexander_iPhoto
09:23:35.407 Starting bonjour for service Nathan Alexander's Photos on Nathan Alexander's Computer and type _tivo-photos._tcp
09:23:35.412 Announcer.run: Started Bonjour for service Nathan Alexander's Photos on Nathan Alexander's Computer and type _tivo-photos._tcp
09:23:35.412 TiVoDesktop: successful announcement of: name=Nathan Alexander's Photos on Nathan Alexander's Computer, type=_tivo-photos._tcp, port=8101, path=/TiVoConnect?Command=QueryContainer&Container=%2fnathanalexander_iPhoto, protocol=http
09:23:35.413 iPhotoRoot: finding an iPhoto file...
09:23:35.420 iTunesUser.findiTunesFile: Checking location /Users/nathanalexander/Pictures/iPhoto Library/AlbumData.xml
09:23:35.421 iPhotoRoot: found iPhoto file /Users/nathanalexander/Pictures/iPhoto Library/AlbumData.xml
09:23:35.421 iPhotoRoot: Reading iPhoto data from file /Users/nathanalexander/Pictures/iPhoto Library/AlbumData.xml
09:23:35.469 iPhotoRoot.loadFromFile: Reading album data for version 5.0 (226)
09:23:35.476 Album: Library
09:23:35.477 elements: 371
09:23:35.491 iPhotoFactory: exception creating new root
java.lang.NullPointerException
at com.tivo.iPhoto.iPhotoPhoto.<init>(iPhotoPhoto.java:68)
at com.tivo.iPhoto.Album.<init>(Album.java:64)
at com.tivo.iPhoto.iPhotoRoot.loadFromFile(iPhotoRoot.java:163)
at com.tivo.iPhoto.iPhotoRoot.<init>(iPhotoRoot.java:51)
at com.tivo.iPhoto.iPhotoFactory.makePluginForUser(iPhotoFactor y.java:27)
at com.tivo.plugin.AbstractPluginFactory.addPluginForUser(Abstr actPluginFactory.java:72)
at com.tivo.plugin.AbstractPluginFactory.usersChanged(AbstractP luginFactory.java:103)
at com.tivo.calypso.Root.build(Root.java:104)
at com.tivo.calypso.Root.<init>(Root.java:63)
at com.tivo.calypso.Root.getRoot(Root.java:32)
at com.tivo.server.TiVoDesktop.main(TiVoDesktop.java:67)


Looks good until "exception creating new root"... right?

You've really got this installed for an enabled root user?
Umm... sure.

[Dennis Wilkinson]

[
Looks good until "exception creating new root"... right?


Yes. That looks like it's having a problem with your iPhoto Library, although it's not clear what. Making an educated guess from the stack trace in your log, it looks like it's failing to parse a photo. I'd try rebuilding the library, just to be safe, following the directions linked to earlier.

Umm... sure.

I asked because the software uses shortusername_iPhoto as an identifier, and your original logs showed a short user name of "root" (that doesn't appear to be the case with the second set.) root is the Unix superuser, and Macs typically have root login disabled.

[bedelman]

It also might be worthwhile to use the Disk Utility to repair permissions on your hard drive.

[stiber]

Try this version of Tivoizer. Use the check box for 16:9 I think I got the numbers right...

I'm trying to use Tivoizer to convert a DivX file. All I get on the TiVo is a black screen, with good audio. The good news is that the file does transfer to the TiVo, which is more than I can say for all my other attempts so far.

Edit: OK, Tivoizer does work, you just have to get the right version, which is hard to tell, because there's no version info in the app. Even more misleading is that the older version has an extra field in its UI and the binary is bigger, both of which might lead someone to think it's the newer version. Find a link to the newest version in the Tivoizer thread (thread number 299134; sorry, no actual link; I don't post often.)

[johnnylundy]

As far as the TiVo not showing the "Photos" menu item after installing the new Tivo Desktop Preference Pane, deleting the two preference files and sharing the Music also fixed it for me.

As mentioned above, delete
/Library/Preferences/com.tivo.desktop
and
/Users/youraccount/Library/Preferences/com.tivo.desktop.plist

and then I enabled the Share Music tab also.
and stop and start the Tivo Desktop server, close and reopen System Preferences.

Before I did this, I saw the Java error in the Log. Afterwards, there is no error.

Hope this helps.

[burbanknate]

It also might be worthwhile to use the Disk Utility to repair permissions on your hard drive.

That did it. Thanks, guys!

[Unix_Beard]

Is this a new feature of 1.9.3?

When you go into Music (using a Mac/iTunes) and select an artist, it used to display all the albums by that artist. Now there is an additional "All" listed. This allows you to play all the albums from the artist. I don't remember seeing this. I like it! More!

[Dennis Wilkinson]

I don't remember seeing that before (of course, these days 99% of my music listening on my TiVo are playlists of kid's music. Thankfully, my kids think They Might Be Giants are a kids band... ;))

[Unix_Beard]

I don't remember seeing that before (of course, these days 99% of my music listening on my TiVo are playlists of kid's music. Thankfully, my kids think They Might Be Giants are a kids band... ;))

Stick the hand inside the puppet head! ;)

[Lopata]

Well, I moved a .tivo file from PC to my NAS and changed the video directory in the Desktop software... but my TiVo server is not publishing music, photos, or videos. I seem to recall this was a problem before. I also restarted TiVo services a few times and rebooted of course. Hmmm... I'm running 10.3.9 fully patched and have tried firewall on with TiVo allowed and firewall off. Anything else I should take a look at?

I was experiencing similar problems running 10.4.6 until I turned off IPv6 in the Network Preference Pane. I rebooted the Macintosh and restarted the TiVo. The TiVo now sees all appropriate folders including Video.

[Dennis Wilkinson]

I was experiencing similar problems running 10.4.6 until I turned off IPv6 in the Network Preference Pane. I rebooted the Macintosh and restarted the TiVo. The TiVo now sees all appropriate folders including Video.

I'm on 10.4.5, but I do have IPv6 enabled, and don't have any issues. Of course, I'm also using static IPs.

[thenightfly42]

I don't remember seeing that before (of course, these days 99% of my music listening on my TiVo are playlists of kid's music. Thankfully, my kids think They Might Be Giants are a kids band... ;))
They are :D . Have you heard the TMBG albums "No!" and "Here Come the ABC's"?

[Dennis Wilkinson]

They are :D . Have you heard the TMBG albums "No!" and "Here Come the ABC's"?

Of course (like I said, I've got kids who listen to TMBG...) ;) But they also dance around the house to "Flood" and "Lincoln". :D

[dubious]

I posted earlier, but did not receive a reply.

I'm trying to get the video feature to work using 1.9.3 and 10.4.6. My Series2 standalone sees my network and I get music and photos. The Now Playing List includes my Mac, but, except for the very first time I accessed it (which did not list the files in my TivoShows folder), it says it cannnot access the Now Playing List on my Mac for an "unknown reason."

I ran the script to keep the video active, I've rebooted my Mac and my tivo, all to no avail. Any ideas?

[Rosincrans]

Anyone else notice that Tivo creates a Properties file for any non Tivo files in your Videos directory? If you open them in Textpad you can type in a description of your shows. Not having a description was one thing I hated about Galleon. :D

[bedelman]

Anyone else notice that Tivo creates a Properties file for any non Tivo files in your Videos directory? If you open them in Textpad you can type in a description of your shows. Not having a description was one thing I hated about Galleon. :DYou can also change the name that's shown on the Now Playing List as well (so it doesn't use the file name itself). It is rather annoying to have all those .properties files hanging around in the folder though.

[James M. Duff]

Hello,

I'm unable to successfully transfer a "tivoizer" converted file from my mac to my tivo. The transfers begin, but do not complete. The failure occurs in two ways. If I initiate the xfer from mac to tivo, and begin to watch during the xfer, it will download only the first 7 minutes of the show, then stop. A 7 minute show then remains in the Now Playing list. If i do not watch during the xfer, the xfer fails, and does not leave a partial file in the now playing list. In both cases, the To Do list recording history shows "not transferred" with the following message:

"filename.mpg from [computer name] (transfer attempted on {date} at {time}) This program was not transferred onto this DVR because the file was larger than expected or because the file was corrupted."

I've tried this with several different sized source files, with and without the Autosize box checked. None of the source files, nor the .mpg files created by the tivoizer conversion were excessively large (all less than 1G). I previously deleted numerous recordings on my tivo and am reasonably sure that this is not an issue of insufficient tivo hard drive space. (deleted files were also removed from the "recently deleted" folder)

To test the basic Tivo Comeback functionality I downloaded a .tivo file from my tivo to my mac using safari, deleted it on the tivo, then re-uploaded it from the mac to the tivo using Tivo Comeback. This test was completely successful. The size of this .tivo file on my mac was approx. 1Gb, which is larger than any of the tivoizer converted files I attempted to xfer.

Since a tivo created .tivo file was successfully uploaded, it appears that the problem exists only with the tivoizer/ffmpegx created files. I've made attempts with the Tivoizer Autosize box checked and unchecked.

Supporting Info

2 different macs, both with:
Mac PBG4, OS 10.4.6,
Tivoizer v0.2b

tivo connected to mac network via ethernet

I would appreciate any suggestions anyone may have to help get this working. Thanks.

[James M. Duff]

I misposted my previous. Sorry.

forum newbie.

[mckingsley]

I have had a problem with Tivo-izer lately also. My error's are similar to yours, I have reverted back to just using ffmpegx for now with the script to make the correct output and that is working for me.

[Rosincrans]

Depending on the file, I've had to use different programs to convert them. It usually just takes a little playing around. I've had the most luck with Tivoizer, but I've had some that gave me errors. I had some files that originated in PAL that had to be converted using FFMPEGX and then also Transcoded using VLC media player.

If you don't get a better answer, try taking one of the files you already converted that isn't working and then run it through VLC. If you choose the Transcoding Wizard with MPEG 2 for video and A/52 for audio and MPEG PS for the encapsulation format, it will probably work on your Tivo.

Good Luck.

[mckingsley]

Well, I have never had a problem using ffmpegx - at least with .avi files. It's just that tivoizer was a great little package to make things easier. And it used to work, don't know what went wrong now.

[makisupa]

I've gotten everything to work. TiVo recognizes Mac and vise versa. I've used Tivoizer to convert files for placing onto the TiVo and I've downloaded files from my Tivo. Now, how do I convert these .Tivo files?

[mckingsley]

I've gotten everything to work. TiVo recognizes Mac and vise versa. I've used Tivoizer to convert files for placing onto the TiVo and I've downloaded files from my Tivo. Now, how do I convert these .Tivo files?


There is no way yet (authorized or not) just using mac software.

[microphony]

I found a very simple way to convert DVD's directly to a format Tivo can see. Only works with standard 4:3 encoded movies.

1. Download mplayer from ...unzip and copy to /Applications or wherever
2. Open terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal)
3. in terminal type /Applications/mplayer dvd:// -dumpstream -dumpfile /Users/george/Desktop/filename.mpg (replace filename with correct path and name)
4. Wait for it to finish

The file should be an exact copy of the DVD. The file size is large, but the speed is realtime I believe, and in messing around with compressing DVD's on the fly tonite, I found the quality poor and problems common. This process doesn't work with DVD's encoded as 16:9 because the size is not one that tivo supports 720x404.

I'm trying to follow these instructions, but I get lost.
I have a DVD I want to convert to a Tivo readable MPEG 2 so I can use my Tivo as a DVD Jukebox.

I've downloaded said programs. I'm unsure how to direct the path to the Vidoe_ts files located inside the DVD (loaded in the slot drive and mounted on the desktop)

Thanks from a newbie

Mac G4 867 w 1gig ram
Series 2 Tivo 80 gig +160 w ethernet USB to wireless

I can see my Computer on the tivo and have "tivoized" video and posted it on my tivo NPL. I can see NPL in Safari.

[notaclone]

Well there went an otherwise billable day. I have goofy internet videos happily converting and transferring away! Now if only I had HD space enough to save BLaderunner.tivo to.
QUESTION:
Is there a simple editor to clip segments of Tivo files (e.g. to save the halftime and toss all that dull football playing from a saved superbowl game), or must I wait for more Mac utilities?

[swaimf]

Hey Dennis. Have you been able to convert .tivo files to something playable on your Mac Os computer? I used your applet. thanks. It appears to have enabled ability to transfer movies from my computer on my Tivo/TV. Does it go in reverse? Do you have suggestions? My little ones are much more quiet in the car when they have something to watch on my ipod.

Swaim

[Dennis Wilkinson]

Hey Dennis. Have you been able to convert .tivo files to something playable on your Mac Os computer? I used your applet. thanks. It appears to have enabled ability to transfer movies from my computer on my Tivo/TV. Does it go in reverse? Do you have suggestions? My little ones are much more quiet in the car when they have something to watch on my ipod.

Nope. Converting the files on Mac OS right now would involve either actually breaking the encryption on the files, which no one has done, to my knowledge (I don't count the various techniques for stripping the encryption that people have been using on Windows, since all of those are using TiVo's software to do the decryption), or having access to Windows (either under an emulator or, on Intel Macs, Boot Camp or Parallels Desktop.)

You can move the TiVo files to your Mac using the web interface on the TiVo, but the only thing you can do with them is move them back to the TiVo to be watched, at least right now.

[Stewie]

I was playing around with this about two weeks ago, but hadn't gotten a chance to post back. First off, thanks to the OP's for finding the command-option-click method of toggling the video file sharing in TiVo DT, and turning on logging.

Guess what? I was able to watch a DVD VOB file without conversion w/ffmepgx or tivoizer or anything else. I had read on a video forum (maybe here?) that unencrypted DVD VOB files were basically just mpeg2 video. So, as an experiment, I copied a VOB file over to my "Tivoshows" directory on my G5 iMac, added an .mpg extension to the name, restarted TiVo DT, and bang, there it was in my shared video in now playing. I transferred it to the TiVo, and I was able to watch it too! :up: It seems the typical DVD VOB file is ~30 min, and maybe a bit smaller than the same duration best quality tivo file.

I also played around with MTR to extract certain chapters to single VOB files, and they work a treat too. This is really handy, as my son has certain favorite scenes on some DVD's and it's a pain to fire up the player just to watch a 4 min segment of Thomas or the like. This way, I can just store them on the TiVo for easy access.

And of course I also confirmed that I can move .tivo files back and forth in between our iMac and our two S2 TiVo's. This is going to make archiving shows & movies a lot easier now too, as I tend to always record in best quality.

TiVo on! :)
-J

[cwoody222]

I went back to using Galleon.

TiVo Desktop seemed to take much too long to "refresh" and allow me to find newly uploaded shows. What I mean is, I'd put a new MPEG file in the correct folder and it could take up to 10 minutes before that file would show up on my TiVo to allow me to start transferring it.

Plus, once a file was on my TiVo I liked to delete it from my Mac. Well, TiVo Desktop wouldn't allow the file to be removed from my Trash because supposedly it was still using the file. Even though the file was done transferring and not even in the TiVo-shared folder.

The only way I could get the file to delete from Trash was to turn off TiVo Desktop.

I realize it's not a public feature yet so I hope it'll get better.

But for now those two things were big enough problems so I just went back to Galleon.

[microphony]

Stewie-
I read your post re changing VOBs to .mpg.
Question-
did you have to use Mac the Ripper?
if you want to get the entire movie at on large VOB try the method in this tutorial www.mpeg2works.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=537

I've been trying to figure a way to turn my TiVo into a DVD Jukebox. Maybe this will do the trick.

My workflow has been
Mac the Ripper can rip a DVD in about 6-10 min.
MPEG Streamer 20-30 min (although this yields a .mpg video the result is
audio drop out and video stutter frames when the action gets fast,
so I dump it to Tivoizer and that fixes the problem, but...)
Tivoizer has been taking over 2 hrs. Yikes.

[Rosincrans]

TiVo Desktop seemed to take much too long to "refresh" and allow me to find newly uploaded shows. What I mean is, I'd put a new MPEG file in the correct folder and it could take up to 10 minutes before that file would show up on my TiVo to allow me to start transferring it.

Plus, once a file was on my TiVo I liked to delete it from my Mac. Well, TiVo Desktop wouldn't allow the file to be removed from my Trash because supposedly it was still using the file. Even though the file was done transferring and not even in the TiVo-shared folder.

The only way I could get the file to delete from Trash was to turn off TiVo Desktop.


Yeah that is a pain. I turn off my Tivo desktop for a second and turn it back on to get it to refresh. Don't like Galleon because I could never get it to work without turning off my firewall.

[mikellanes]

Well I have been having a problem with this version and am trying to solve it for a few days. When playing music from itunes on the TiVo the files play for a little bit then starts to stutter and stop then picks up again for a little bit and goes through this process over and over until it the song is finished.

I have tried re-installing, repairing permissions, creating a new user, all to no avail. I am out of ideas, anyone know a solution to this? The older version didn't seem to have a problem playing any of my files.

BTW this is a Dual 2.0G5 with 4GB Ram, tivo is hardwired on the LAN and is a Series 2 DirecTiVo

[mikellanes]

Seems to be one of the quicktime plugins, I removed them all rebooted and now it is working flawlessly. The hard part will be figuring out which one, there was about 15 in there.

[Chazz]

*swoon*

I started last night with this thread and its related software and goals and am continuing this afternoon...

My head is spinning!

So far I've got one small video to work.

There should be a freelance work situation with TiVo to hurry this to Macintosh users.


Hats off to everyone as I sit back and see what happens next.


*now where's that aspirin?* :p

[C]

[Stewie]

did you have to use Mac the Ripper?


I did indeed. I used title extraction, specifically, to get certain chapters only. I know extraction to single, large VOB file is possible, but I haven't tried that yet for viewing on TiVo. I'm short of space as it is, plus waiting around for a multi-gig xfer on our 802.11b network doesn't sound like fun. :rolleyes:

[makisupa]

Any updates yet for converting .TIVO files to useable format on a Mac? E.g., .MOV, .MPEG, etc?

[jtkohl]

I was experiencing similar problems running 10.4.6 until I turned off IPv6 in the Network Preference Pane. I rebooted the Macintosh and restarted the TiVo. The TiVo now sees all appropriate folders including Video.

No joy for me. In a terminal, I run "lsof -p <pid-of-TiVo Desktop>" and I still see the sockets bound to IPV6 only, even after disabling IPv6 and rebooting.

[jtkohl]

I did some network sniffing, and I see an SLP announcement of the TiVo Desktop, but no tivo beacon announcement.
I have an old tivo beacon written in perl, which I dusted off and voila, I can access my itunes library via the TiVo desktop.

Unfortunately, there's no decent hierarchy in the TiVo desktop. It doesn't understand playlist folders, putting them all in one top-level list. So I'll probably go back to playing with the old ptivohmo I had on my previous UNIX machine.

[Gulley]

Sorry... Nevermind... :)

[pdxkevin]

HELL HAS FROZEN OVER! I REPEAT, HELL HAS FROZEN OVER!

TiVoToGo for Mac is just around the corner...I can feel it.

This is why: Despite the current version being very inferior to the Windows version, AND it being like Swiss Cheese in terms of holes and security issues, Yahoo finally released a new version of Messenger for Mac, and it's only been three years. This has been way up there on my list of poor customer service pet peeves. The almost abusive neglect for TiVo Mac customers has been right next to it.

TTG for Mac OS X: Almost here.

Will hell freeze over twice?

[cwoody222]

But aren't there tons of other programs that will let you connect to the Yahoo! IM service?

Whereas there's no way, without using Windows, or cracking your box open to hack it, to play TiVo files.

Hell's still toasty... and TiVo's Mac support is still close to non-existent.

[TydalForce]

HELL HAS FROZEN OVER! I REPEAT, HELL HAS FROZEN OVER!



Yeah that was pretty much my reaction to the new Yahoo Messenger... which is actually a pretty slick application now. Nice of them to finally get on the ball....

[chudel]

Hey - can I confirm something? I have the DirecTivo (6.2 Hacked) and it just doesn't want to work with sharing videos via TivoDesktop and ~/TivoShows -- is that to be expected? Indeed, it also breaks Photos/Music sharing (they don't show up in the NowPlaying list anymore).

Which is a bummer since having cancelled DirecTV service, I am hoping to still use the DTivo box as a general media server (it works great for music - even the iTunes Radio stations!).

[jtkohl]

I did some network sniffing, and I see an SLP announcement of the TiVo Desktop, but no tivo beacon announcement.
Hopefully this will help any new people:
I can get a beacon on the network, and TiVo sees the server just fine, plays music, photos, etc. if I tell it to publish both iTunes and iPhoto. When I published only iTunes, no joy.

[simplyaz]

I was successful in getting my mac to show in the now playing screen, however the .tivo files that I have archived do not show on tivo .. tivo shows the file is empty.. but on my mac i have 6 files.

Any suggesstions?

[mightyrick]

I have to say that I was actually considering building a computer just to be a media center. After getting this working, I'm happy for a while.

For me, I was able to download the TivoDesktop 1.9.3 to a 1Ghz G4 iBook hardwired to my LAN and start it (with the option key, or whas it the Command key?) and get the video tab. No problems with that (sorry to those who are having problems).

I had an MPEG2 file that I placed in the directory that the Tivo Desktop created. I stopped and started the Tivo Desktop and voila!, that video showed on the Tivo. Transferred and played just fine.

So, now I've got 15 movies showing on the Tivo with more on the way. Here's how I've been getting them there.

1) Rip the DVD with Mac the Ripper. I do a few DVDs at a time. They each take between 20 and 40 minutes to rip on a 2Ghz intel iMac Core Duo (512MB of memory right now).

2) Drag the resulting directories into VisualHub. VisualHub rocks! It's not free ($23) but it converts nearly any format video into almost any other format video. It's by the same guy who wrote iSquint, which is a freeware tool to convert video to iPod formats. VisualHub comes with a script to make the Video tab show up automatically and it comes with a profile built-in for MPEG2 video that the Tivo accepts. Best of all, you can batch convert.

3) Once it's done converting (30-40 mins) I right-click on the video and click "get info", check that the whole movie got converted and the aspect ratio is correct.

4) Copy the videos over my network to the iBook. After about 5 minutes the new videos show up.

5) Grin like a maniac because I don't have to figure out where my 4 year old son hid the copy of Monsters, Inc.

[joewhite]

Hey - can I confirm something? I have the DirecTivo (6.2 Hacked) and it just doesn't want to work with sharing videos via TivoDesktop and ~/TivoShows -- is that to be expected? Indeed, it also breaks Photos/Music sharing (they don't show up in the NowPlaying list anymore).

Which is a bummer since having cancelled DirecTV service, I am hoping to still use the DTivo box as a general media server (it works great for music - even the iTunes Radio stations!).

I'm having the same problem. Tried on my PowerBook G4 and my G4 Mac Mini: works fine before accessing the video tab; after accessing the video tab, nothing works, even after deleting and reinstalling the Pref pane and all related pref files.

Anyone have an idea how to fix this?

[joewhite]

went in and made sure I deleted both com.tivo.desktop and com.tivo.desktop.plist, as well as the entire TiVo folder from application support, then reinstalled, and got the Music and Photos to show back up. But still no videos.

[furtisclick]

Can anyone figure out a way to send a tivo recording over to my mac?

[bedelman]

Can anyone figure out a way to send a tivo recording over to my mac?
The Macintosh can retrieve the recordings by using the unsupported web interface (go to https:// followed by the IP address of the TiVo). The user name is "tivo" (without the quotes) and the password is your Media Access Key

You just cannot watch the recording on a Macintosh (or do much more than just store it there)

[Mathmn]

On my Imac G5, I cannot get the Tivo Desktop preference pane to open. When I click on System Preferences, Tivo Desktop, the dialogue box says, loading Tivo Desktop, but the window never appears. I am running OS X 10.4.8. This little gem is useless unless I can set it.

[gerickson]

Thanks to everyone here who helped me figure out my AAC -> static issue running on a Mac Pro w/ Mac OS X 10.4.8 and TiVo Desktop 1.9.3 (008).

I tweaked the recipe slightly and installed the following script in "/Library/Application Support/TiVo/lame" since SoundConvert checks there first:

#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/local/bin/lame -x $*

However, in the process of doing this, I noticed that TiVo Desktop leaves around zombie processes when you skip AAC tracks. I did a 'ps -jx' and noticed tens to hundreds of sleeping 'SoundConvert' and 'lame' processes.

Has anyone modified the above script/wrapper to reap any such zombies before exec'ing the next iteration of 'lame' on the "current" track?

[stoli412]

However, in the process of doing this, I noticed that TiVo Desktop leaves around zombie processes when you skip AAC tracks. I did a 'ps -jx' and noticed tens to hundreds of sleeping 'SoundConvert' and 'lame' processes.I've noticed this as well. If you get enough of them hanging around, music stops playing on the TiVo altogether until you restart the Mac. I'd love to know if there is a solution to this problem.

[danka]

To use the applet, just download the attachment, unzip it, and double-click. It's a toggle, so one run enables, the next run disables.[/QUOTE]

Is it available? I seem to be redirected to a no-no page.

[Dennis Wilkinson]

I think you may need to have a certain number of posts (5?) before you can download attachments. I just grabbed it without difficulty from the link.

If getting a few more posts under your belt doesn't do the trick, PM me with your email address and I'll pass it along that way.

[wordy]

I'm trying to use ffmpegx to convert avi files to MPEG2 files on a Mac, but I can't seem to get the components installed. I go to the link and download and then locate as directed. But then I click install and I'm right back where I started.

The components show up as Excel files. Is this the problem? What can I do to make this work?

Does anyone know of any similar free software that might work for me? Thanks!

[TydalForce]

Try TiVoizer

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/29803

[Craig Ruaux]

I have to use circuitous language here as the forum software will not let me quote. I am quoting the following text from an earlier post ->

The Macintosh can retrieve the recordings by using the unsupported web interface (going to the secure login page followed by the IP address of the TiVo). The user name is "tivo" (without the quotes) and the password is your Media Access Key


My Issue:

I've been having a lot of luck with all the rest of the instructions for accessing the TIVO and getting the Tivo to see files on my Mac, but I am completely at sea with this...

Accessing the TIVO via Firefox using the IP address for the box, I can get the splash screen, but if I use the secure login then TIVO's IP address I get "Access Forbidden No Authorization". Using Safari I can see the TIVO box, but only get the splash screen again, no login requests.

If anyone has any suggestions I would love to hear them.

[TydalForce]

make sure you are using https:// and not http://

as soon as you connect with https:// it should prompt you to log in

[gonzotek]

I have to use circuitous language here as the forum software will not let me quote. I am quoting the following text from an earlier post ->

The Macintosh can retrieve the recordings by using the unsupported web interface (going to the secure login page followed by the IP address of the TiVo). The user name is "tivo" (without the quotes) and the password is your Media Access Key


My Issue:

I've been having a lot of luck with all the rest of the instructions for accessing the TIVO and getting the Tivo to see files on my Mac, but I am completely at sea with this...

Accessing the TIVO via Firefox using the IP address for the box, I can get the splash screen, but if I use the secure login then TIVO's IP address I get "Access Forbidden No Authorization". Using Safari I can see the TIVO box, but only get the splash screen again, no login requests.

If anyone has any suggestions I would love to hear them.Are video transfers enabled? Check (and if necessary enable) them by logging in to tivo.com/manage, then choose the "Name Your DVRs" link.

[Craig Ruaux]

That may be it (The allowing of transfers...), I only activated that function a couple of hours ago.

Thanks for the suggestions.

[iindigo]

I recently turned on the goback functionality, and it works, but there are couple problems -


#1: When the TiVo gets to about 3/4 finished copying a video from my Mac to itself, it gives an error saying that the DVR or my computer was turned off, or the network was interrupted. This is not true, and the movie files always stop at the same place.

#2: The converted movies from my Mac, when viewed on the TiVo, have major clipping issues - roughly 1/5-1/6 of the picture is cut off at the edges. This is very problematic for video with subtitles, as sometimes it will completely chop off entire lines.



If it helps any, all videos were converted by the latest beta of TiVoizer.

Any idea what might be causing these problems? Thanks!

[Rosincrans]

#1: When the TiVo gets to about 3/4 finished copying a video from my Mac to itself, it gives an error saying that the DVR or my computer was turned off, or the network was interrupted. This is not true, and the movie files always stop at the same place.

Any idea what might be causing these problems? Thanks!I get this problem with larger files across my Wireless network, I don't think anybody has this problem with a wired connection.

1. When using Tivoizer, try setting the bit rate at the lowest setting (1000)
2. If that doesn't help, try splitting the file in half before Tivoizing and import them in two parts.

If you still have the problem, try a much smaller file to verify that the it will work if the file is smaller.

[iindigo]

I get this problem with larger files across my Wireless network, I don't think anybody has this problem with a wired connection.

1. When using Tivoizer, try setting the bit rate at the lowest setting (1000)
2. If that doesn't help, try splitting the file in half before Tivoizing and import them in two parts.

If you still have the problem, try a much smaller file to verify that the it will work if the file is smaller.


The videos have the lowest bitrate available in TiVoizer (1024), and I just tested it with a smaller file too (four-minute music video, low-res) and it still cops out at about 5/6 of the way through copying. And yes, my connection is wireless...

I'm really getting fed up with my TiVo... strongly considering a MythTV box or something similar.

[already_in_use]

OK, I've done a bit more digging. Just for giggles, I'll walk through it.

Starting the TiVo Desktop server also placed a "TiVoShows" folder in my home directory. Just placing a file in that directory didn't do anything, even after starting and stopping the server.

So, I look at the "Raw" preferences, i.e., in Terminal:

defaults read com.tivo.desktop

and see the following in the output:

FileVideo = {
Enabled = 0;
ShareAll = 1;
SharedItems = ("/Users/dennis/TiVoShows");
SharingName = "Elroy (Dennis J Wilkinson II)";
VideoUIEnabled = 0;
vKey = "";
};

Hmm. Let's try enabling it:

defaults write com.tivo.desktop FileVideo -dict-add Enabled -bool true

and restart the server. Hey hey... my Mac is in my Now Playing list -- with the MPEG file I added listed. But what's this "VideoUIEnabled" switch?

defaults write com.tivo.desktop FileVideo -dict-add VideoUIEnabled -bool true

Re-open the TiVo Desktop pref pane and, yup... there's a Video tab now, that'll let you enable/disable video sharing, set the location, enter your MAK, and set a video share name.

In other words, as Dan surmised above, they implemented TiVoToComeback! :)

If you want to play with this yourself, just:

1) Stop the TiVo Desktop server in the pref pane. Close the pref pane.

2) Launch the Terminal utility (in /Applications/Utiliities) and, at the prompt, enter the following command (copy and paste is your friend) and press return:
defaults write com.tivo.desktop FileVideo -dict-add VideoUIEnabled -bool true
If you have Apple's developer tools installed, you can open the com.tivo.desktop.plist file in your preferences folder with the Property List Editor and change the setting that way, too.

3) Reopen the pref pane, turn on video sharing, and set things up as you like. I don't know if you need to enter your MAK -- I didn't, and a plain-jane MPEG transferred OK, but I haven't tried a .tivo file.)

4) Start the server again.

Disclaimer time: Use at your own risk. If it's there, but turned off, there may very well be a reason for it (as in, it might not be ready for prime time, may have ghastly bugs, et cetera.) I've transferred exactly one MPEG file of the right flavor so far, and it worked. But if this thing goes off and trashes your hard drive, devours your children, whatever: don't blame me or TiVo. It was hidden, after all.

OK, now I'm going to go watch Lost, and use this thing for what I bought it for... ;)

Edit: To make things easier for those who don't like (or even know about) the Terminal application, I whipped together an AppleScript applet that toggles the VideoUIEnabled setting (and disables the "Enabled" setting when turning off the UI.) Consider the applet to be in the public domain, and completely devoid of any warranty. While I'd expect it to work for most configurations, it may not. It does no version checking whatsoever, but the worst that should mean right now would be preferences that do nothing in older versions of TiVo Desktop. Use at your own risk.

To use the applet, just download the attachment, unzip it, and double-click. It's a toggle, so one run enables, the next run disables.
Hello!

I am new here and for some reason, the site won't allow me to download this file...

could someone help me?

Thanks!

-rich

[Dennis Wilkinson]

I am new here and for some reason, the site won't allow me to download this file...

could someone help me?

I think you need to make at least 5 posts to download attachments.

If you go and grab VisualHub from any of the usual Mac sites, they include an enabler app that does largely the same thing.

[trublvr]

How can I disable the Tivo To Go in the terminal. I think it is interferring with another program I am trying to run.

Thanks

[ryry919]

i am new to this whole "hacked" version of TiVo Desktop thing... with that being said... i did the whole "Toggle TiVo Video Sharing" program and followed all of the directions, i even see my video's section on my "now playing" section on my tivo series 2.......

now how do i get the tv shows i have recorded to my macbook pro with intel. i see the tivo folder on my computer but nothing is in it.

any help would be greatly appreciated. thanks!

[bedelman]

now how do i get the tv shows i have recorded to my macbook pro with intel. i see the tivo folder on my computer but nothing is in it.
You need to put either some .tivo files from a TiVo on your account (the Media Access Key in the file needs to match) or a MPEG-2 file in there (the MPEG-2 files have to follow some specific guidelines -- search for MPEG-2 at http://www.tivo.com/support )

[ryry919]

i am sorry, that makes no sense to me. everything i read says i need to buy some stupid roxio program. is that what i need?

[TydalForce]

The official, supported, no-question-of-legality way to do it -- get Roxio Toast 8 which was just released last week http://www.roxio.com/

The unofficial, unsupported, "questionable legality" way to do it is with TiVo Decode Manager http://tdm.sourceforge.net/

Either method will allow you to pull video files from your TiVo to your computer, for watching or transferring to iPod, burning to DVD, etc.

[Tarik]

Try this version of Tivoizer. Use the check box for 16:9 I think I got the numbers right...
Is this app still being developed? Whatever happened to half.italian?

[rcm3]

I think you need to make at least 5 posts to download attachments.

If you go and grab VisualHub from any of the usual Mac sites, they include an enabler app that does largely the same thing.

Thanks for the info and your good work!

[ubell]

I had Videos working from my Mac using the info provided by Dennis Wilkinson. I downloaded one video and did not use it for months. Now it no longer seems to work. I don't think anything has changed. I can see the music from my mac, but the video service does not appear.

Any ideas?

[stevenkan]

I haven't used TiVo Desktop to play my iTunes library thru my TiVo in a while (maybe a month?) and today it didn't work. Since then I think there's been both an OS update and an iTunes/QT update, both of which I blindly installed w/o thinking or testing.

Has anyone else had problems with TiVo desktop on their Mac(s) recently?

[Dennis Wilkinson]

They've been working for me as recently as yesterday, and I'm completely up-to-date on both Apple and TiVo software updates on the machine I use as a server.

[jschaffe]

I just installed Tivo Desktop on my fully up-to-date Mac, and I got music to play...once...and photos to display...once...and now I either get "No music is currently being shared..." or Error#0-65535 for photos. I rebooted the Mac, checked the firewall, tried with iTunes and iPhoto running, and without, no joy!

This is a 2-day out of the box Series 3, and I love it (still waiting for the HD TV to arrive), but this is disappointing!

Jeff

[bedelman]

...Error#0-65535 for photos...

Check the version of iPhoto that you're using. I believe TiVo Desktop for Mac OSX requires iLife '05 (iPhoto 5) or higher.

Also, go into the Sharing preference pane and see if you have any unusual characters in your computer's name at the top of the preference pane. If you do, you might want to try changing it.

[jschaffe]

Thanks for the reply, Bob.

My computer's name is "Jeff's G5" and in TiVo Desktop I'm sharing "Music on Jeff's G5" and "Photos on Jeff's G5". Just spaces and apostrophes.

I'll try removing the apostrophes when I get a chance.

Jeff

[noodlehead]

TydalForce: Like cwoody222 said, yes, it will eventually stop. Just don't look at it. It's shy.

mimyc: Regarding ffmpeg - I am definitly a newbie with Tivo, but have some reasonable experience with video conversion on the Mac. That said, ffmpegX can be tricky in that sometimes a simple drag and drop in the Summary tab works fine - depending on what Target format is selected. Other times you need to go to the next tab, Video, and make some adjustments. 1) select a Video Codec that works. (I've had good luck with the top three or four, or passthrough, in the drop down list.) If you use passthrough, select the Audio tab and choose AC3 stereo. 2) Still in the video tab, check the Video Parameters. Make sure the size is correct, i.e., matches the actual size of the file you are trying to convert; and that the Autosize drop down has the right aspect ratio. I have had best results sticking with 4:3 or 16:9. Then Framerate. Probably NTSC unless you are out of the US. If these changes don't help, try this: Drag your file to ffmpegX Source. From window area Click Video button, set 1 min keep in (only 1 minute), Set video size to 320x240 (typical but see 2 above). Click Summary button. Click Target format "To" triangle for pop-up menu. This time I picked AVI DivX. Click encode button. Watch encode progress bar for what seems like a long time. Double-click .avi file on Desktop. Opens in QuickTime Player and video plays. Hopefully.

Dennis: Now I'm nervous. I spoke with a Tivo tech support person and was told all I had to do was to have Tivo Plus; then Tivo To Go; and Roxio Toast 8. I would then be able to see my playlist on my Mac, and be able to drag and drop files to my hard drive from the Tivo box. No? I am new to Tivo and was given a Toshiba RSTX20 with Basic Tivo. I ike it enough to buy a new box and get Tivo plus. But I only want to do so if I can get files off it and on to my Mac. (*PS, you did a great job documenting your efforts.)

[jschaffe]

My computer's name is "Jeff's G5" and in TiVo Desktop I'm sharing "Music on Jeff's G5" and "Photos on Jeff's G5". Just spaces and apostrophes.

I'll try removing the apostrophes when I get a chance.

Jeff


Didn't work, exactly the same behavior :(

[Dennis Wilkinson]

Dennis: Now I'm nervous. I spoke with a Tivo tech support person and was told all I had to do was to have Tivo Plus; then Tivo To Go; and Roxio Toast 8. I would then be able to see my playlist on my Mac, and be able to drag and drop files to my hard drive from the Tivo box. No? I am new to Tivo and was given a Toshiba RSTX20 with Basic Tivo. I ike it enough to buy a new box and get Tivo plus. But I only want to do so if I can get files off it and on to my Mac. (*PS, you did a great job documenting your efforts.)

Well, that's not quite right, but you do need TiVo Plus to move video to and from the box. You don't need a new box for that; you can get TiVo Plus for your Toshiba unit (all TiVo Plus means is that you've signed up for the TiVo service on the box.) If you're going to be doing this often, though, a new box may not be a bad idea, as the network performance of the Toshibas is pretty bad (I have one myself.)

Getting video from your Mac to the TiVo requires only turning on the back door on the (free) TiVo Desktop (and encoding it properly.) Getting it to your Mac requires either the (officially-supported) Roxio Toast or the (unofficial, not-even-close-to-endorsed-by-TiVo) TiVo Decode Manager.

[bedelman]

Didn't work, exactly the same behavior :(
What about the version of iPhoto you have? If it is iPhoto 5 or higher, you might want to try rebuilding your iPhoto library. You do this by holding down both the option and apple keys and then double-click on the iPhoto application.

[noodlehead]

Dennis
I don't mean to bother you with this but you know a lot and I've been going in circles. Can you provide a little assistance?
I subscribed to Tivo plus, paid for a plan, downloaded and installed Tivo to Go for the mac. I also bought Toast 8. Took me a while to figure out that I have to get at my Tivo play list "through" Toast. I went through its setup and entered meadia keys, etc. Eventually I got a Tivo Transfer Window. But there's nothing in it. I went back through Toast support. I read this:
To use these features, you need a TiVoToGo compatible TiVo® DVR connected directly to your Mac or to your home network via wired or wireless connection.
Connecting your TiVo® Series2 DVR to your home network
TiVoToGo is compatible with any TiVo Series2 DVR connected to your home network. For information on how to...
I'm connetcted via a wireless network. My Toshiba RSTX20 is up and running. Channel changing, recording etc. Do you have any more info about this Toshiba machine? Toast says, "TiVoToGo is compatible with any TiVo Series2 DVR connected to your home network." But it also says, [I]"To use these features, you need a TiVoToGo compatible TiVo® DVR."
After all this I don't want to believe this Toshiba can't do it.
Any help? Thanks.

[bedelman]

After all this I don't want to believe this Toshiba can't do it.
Toast 8 (and TiVo Transfer) works with my Toshiba RS-TX20 -- along with the other Series 2 boxes I have.

The first thing to try would be to verify connectivity between your Macintosh and your Toshiba. On the Toshiba, go to the Phone and Network Settings screen and note the IP address that's shown. Then open a browser on the Macintosh and try to go to that IP address. If it works, you'll get a "welcome" page of sorts.

If that's OK, the next thing to check is to see if you have the Mac OSX firewall running and to see if it might be blocking the connection on the ports that are used by TiVo Transfer. Go to the Sharing preference pane and see if the Mac OSX firewall is enabled. If it is, stop it from running and see if TiVo Transfer can find the TiVo. Also, while you're in the Sharing preference pane see if there are any unusual characters in the computer name shown at the top of the window (or if the name is blank)

The next thing is to check to see if the Bonjour discovery protocol is able to find your TiVo. You can do this with either Safari or by using Bonjour Browser (available at www.tildesoft.com). With Safari, use the preferences for Bookmarks to include Bonjour in your bookmarks bar. Once done, a Bonjour pull-down menu will appear in the bookmarks bar and the TiVo should be listed on the pull-down. Bonjour Browser can go farther and show you the actual services being broadcast over Bonjour. Some routers don't handle Bonjour correctly which will interfere with the discovery of the TiVo on the network.

Let's see how far this gets you...

[noodlehead]

bedelman; and Dennis
It's working. I think the problem was Tivo took 14 hours to do what it needed to do after I subscribed. About an hour ago I tuned on my set, hit Tivo central and everything was different. Sure enough, my Toast Tivo Transfer now recognizes my Tivo playlist.
But I am sadly disappointed. I had hopes I could "drag and drop" the recorded files from the DVR to my hard drive. That was my goal all along. But it's chugging away right now making one transfer. Seems to be doing so in just about real time. Do you have any different experience making transfers? Shoot, I could have done this all along by simply burning recordings to (built in) DVD and slipping that into my computer. Tivo sales people said I could drag files over. Maybe this is a communication problem. When I say "drag" I mean "drag," not tediously play and copy. It's a hard drive, right. And the recorded shows are mpeg files, right? So how come I can't reach in, grab them, and haul them over - like any other file on a hard drive? Am I missing something?

[noodlehead]

Aw Jeez. This is turning out to be way disappointing. It took 46 minutes to transfer a Medium Quality, 60 minute show. And then, ugh, the finished file is a .Tivo file? Nothing can handle it except Toast. I've thrown QT Pro, MPEG Streamclip, VLC, MacOS X2, and ffmpeg at it. Nada. And as far as I can tell, there's no way to edit this file in the Toast Video Player. So what am I doing? What's the point? Why on earth can't I just get that mpeg file that my Toshiba DVR recorded?
As a side note, after trying all menu items in Toast Video Player, I tried Help. And it took me to Elgato Home page and an add for Eye TV. If something doesn't give with all this, I going to go for the EyeTV product and try that.
Sorry about ranting but I don't understand why this is so difficult.

[noodlehead]

The Macintosh can retrieve the recordings by using the unsupported web interface (go to https:// followed by the IP address of the TiVo). The user name is "tivo" (without the quotes) and the password is your Media Access Key

You just cannot watch the recording on a Macintosh (or do much more than just store it there)


HEY, that's darn cool! It worked.
I'm only a week old in Tivo world and my goal has been to get recorded files off the Tivo and onto my Mac (maybe some editing but mostly to put on a laptop for travel purposes). Has anyone testing this out for speed, compared to using Tivo to Go, Toast, Tivo Transfer?
Now, as a Newbie, and at the risk of embarrassing myself, why does anyone want to get video from their Mac to the Tivo?

[noodlehead]

Found my answers. I posted under a new thread: "Uh, it works! Mac access, transfer, edit files."
Thanks much for the help.

[Dennis Wilkinson]

Now, as a Newbie, and at the risk of embarrassing myself, why does anyone want to get video from their Mac to the Tivo?

Because I'd much rather watch things (well, at least things that are at least 480p resolution, anyway) on the 65", ISF-calibrated, 16:9 display in my living room from the comfort of my couch than I would on the (comparatively) dinky 24" panel attached to my Mac... ;)

[3finger]

For whatever reason, I am unable to download the Apple Script shortcut. Everytime I click on the link, I am sent to a page that says I have to log in - and after I do that, I am again sent to the login page. Like a loop. Can someone please repost the script? Please?

[Dennis Wilkinson]

For whatever reason, I am unable to download the Apple Script shortcut. Everytime I click on the link, I am sent to a page that says I have to log in - and after I do that, I am again sent to the login page. Like a loop. Can someone please repost the script? Please?

I think you need to have more than 5 posts to download attachments.

[snowjay]

I've enabled, video sharing, see my Mac in NPL, downloaded a few shows and when I put the .tivo files back in the TivoShows folder I don't see them under my Mac in the NPL. It says I have no recordings. I've stopped and started the firewall and TiVo Desktop. There is no love. :(

What am I doing wrong?

[Dennis Wilkinson]

Not sure. You have nothing but .TiVo files in the TiVoShows folder?

Two things to try:

First, on your Mac, try going to this address (it should work in Safari, but Firefox will render the XML output better):

http://127.0.0.1:8101/TiVoConnect?Command=QueryContainer&Container=%2fshortname_FileVideo

where shortname is your short user name. (Be sure the %2f is there ahead of it.)

You should get an XML response that describes your videos. If you don't, that's a big clue that the server on the Mac isn't recognizing your files. If you do, that points at the TiVo. I'm guessing you won't get anything meaningful back.

The second thing you can try is to turn on logging at the highest level, then looking at the log for messages related to video. Open System Prefs, option-click the TiVo Desktop icon, and you'll see the logging settings. Turn it on, set the level to 20, and restart TiVo Desktop. The path to the log file is right there. After TiVo Desktop finishes starting (it'll take some time, depending on how much stuff you share) take a look at the logs. Feel free to post snippets here if there's something you have questions about.

[snowjay]

Thanks for your help.

Yes only one .TiVo file. I even changed the name of it to get rid of the semicolons that Toast put in the file name.

I did what you said and when going directly to the URL it gives me my share name and tells me I have 0 items.

I turned on debugging and here are some of the more interesting messages...


22:21:05.782 com.tivo.filevideo.FileVideoRoot.updateSharing(xxxxx): rejecting shared album /Users/xxxxx/TiVoShows

22:21:06.116 Unable to find meta data from .TiVo file: /Users/xxxxx/TiVoShows/Ask_This_Old_House_Plumbing_1176636598.TiVo with exception: java.lang.NullPointerException
22:21:06.116 FileVideoRoot.rebuild: unable to add file /Users/xxxxx/TiVoShows/Ask_This_Old_House_Plumbing_1176636598.TiVo


Even though it said it rejected the shared folder it still read it anyway but it looks like it doesn't like the file? That file was dowloaded via Toast and I used it to export to my iPod and all the metadata seemed to show up there.

[Dennis Wilkinson]

OK, that makes more sense.

You apparently either don't have the MAK (Media Access Key) entered in the video part of the TiVo prefs, our your MAK contains a typo (I can get those same errors if I remove my MAK and restart TiVo Desktop.)

I get the "rejecting shared album" error even when things work, so that's a red herring.

[snowjay]

I checked, double and tripled checked the MAK and its exactly what my TiVo says and Toast has the same key entered in it and it was able to download and convert the files for iPod.

When I do read the settings via "defaults read com.tivo.desktop" it doesn't show it as being enabled, even though the check box is checked and the Mac shows up in the NPL. Other weird thing is that iTunes and iPhoto show enabled and I have those unchecked.


{
FileVideo = {
Enabled = 0;
...



I guess I'll try manually enabling it and see what happens.

[snowjay]

Well as soon as I closed System Preferences the file was updated with the correct enabled status.

I then restarted the server and still no dice.

I changed where it looks for files to the directory Toast used to originally place them and I get the same unable to find meta data errors for each file.

[snowjay]

Well I loaded TiVo Desktop on my pc and as soon as I started downloading a file my pc name showed up in the NPL and that program already appears.

Since that will be a known "good" file I'll try and bring that over to the Mac and see if it works, make sure it's not something goofy with the Toast download.

[Dennis Wilkinson]

It looks like that error could be caused by TiVo Desktop having an incorrect MAK or a corrupted file. It also doesn't look like TiVo Desktop doesn't do any real input validation -- if I enter a space after my MAK in System Prefs, that also breaks things.

Definitely worth checking the corrupt file case, though. Keep us posted.

[snowjay]

I deleted and retyped the MAK, no change.

I started to copy the file in question over to my pc and as soon as it started copying it showed up in the NPL under the pc name, so it doesn't look like a corrupted file.

The TiVo Desktop for Mac is showing me no love. :(

[Dennis Wilkinson]

Your logs still look the same, too?

If it's not a corrupt file, and the MAK is OK, and your logs are the same, then something else is causing the file's metadata to not be parsed correctly. Could very well be a bug in TiVo Desktop (I'm sure that the TiVo-to-come-back stuff isn't there "officially" for a reason, and bugs like this would certainly be a reason.)

I can think of three other cases to try:

- a different video downloaded by your PC and moved to your Mac
- a different video downloaded by Toast
- the same video, but downloaded via the web interface (https://your.tivos.ip/ using 'tivo' as the user name and your MAK as the password)

You could also delete your TiVo Desktop preferences entirely (/Library/Preferences/com.tivo.desktop.plist) and start fresh, just in case.

[snowjay]

I haven't tried moving a video from my PC to Mac yet but here is what I have done and still get the same "Unable to find meta data in .TiVo file ... exception: java.lang.NullPointerException" error.


Deleted the .plist file. Opened up Sys Prefs to recreate it. Tested video sharing. :(
Opened up Toast so it put its items back in the .plist file. Tested video sharing. :(
Download brand new show from TiVo via Toast. Tested video sharing. :(
Downloaded same video as above via web browser. Tested video sharing. :(
Thinking this maybe a PPC issue, I tried enabling video sharing on my Intel Mini and downloaded a show via web browser (no Toast installed) Tested video sharing. :(

I am able to play the downloaded files via Toast or export to iPod. So unless Toast is doing something screwy I don't think a pc downloaded video will make much difference but I will try that later.

[Dennis Wilkinson]

That's really very odd. I have this working on multiple Macs (admittedly, all PowerPC) with no issues, and I have to explicitly do something wrong when I configure the system to get similar errors in the log.

The only other thing that comes to mind is file permissions. TiVo Desktop runs as suid root, meaning it should have access to everything. If those permissions are wrong, that could be an issue (although how it could be wrong on more than one machine I don't know). Try running this command in a Terminal window:


ls -l /Library/Application\ Support/TiVo/TiVoDesktop

It should look something like this:

-rwsr-xr-x 1 root daemon 84412 Apr 17 2006 /Library/Application Support/TiVo/TiVoDesktop

The first column is important, as is the column that reads "root" -- if those aren't set correctly, then TiVo Desktop won't be able to access your video; of course, it wouldn't be able to see your music or photos, either. If it isn't, repairing permissions with Disk Utility should fix the problem.

You haven't made any tweaks to your Java installation?

What version of Mac OS X are you running?

When you made your tests above, only the file you were testing was in your TiVoShows folder?

You might also try a different location for your TiVoShows folder, but that's really grasping at straws.

[snowjay]

File permissions are exactly as you have listed. I even did a repair permissions just in case and retested. No change. :(

My Powerbook is running 10.4.10 and the Intel Mini is 10.4.9.

I haven't knowingly made any changes to my Java environment. I'll have to see what software I have installed across both platforms to see if they modify anything.

I've tried one show in the TivoShows folder, 2 shows, and even the TiVoRecordings folder that Toast set up, with 4 shows that it downloaded.

My TiVo Desktop is 1.9.3 (008).

[Dennis Wilkinson]

What's odd about this is that you're seeing the exact same symptoms on 2 machines, and I'm not aware of others running into this issue at all.

OS version shouldn't be an issue (or, at least, it's worked for me under both of those versions.) I also don't think that it's likely that anything would have changed your Java installation in a way that affects things.

Another thing you can try is to take the TiVo wrapper out of the equation. You'd need to encode a small piece of video (any arbitrary Quicktime movie should do it) as MPEG2 in a flavor the TiVo can understand, put that file (and only that file) in the folder that TiVo Desktop is sharing, restarting TiVoDesktop (to avoid waiting up to 15 minutes for TD to poll for the file), and seeing if that transfers. Raw MPEG2 files don't have any metadata to speak of (TiVoDesktop creates a .properties file for metadata instead) so there's no in-file to parse, and what needs parsing isn't affected by the MAK.

You can do this with the demo version of VisualHub (http://www.techspansion.com/VisualHub/), which should give you a 2-minute sample. Or, I could prep something short for you to download (PM me if you're interested in me doing this, although I won't get to it until sometime this evening.)

[AAINO]

Wow I am actually having the exact same problem with my Macbook running 10.4.10. I actually have the full version of VisualHub. I actually converted an episode of Charmed and put it in my TivoShows folder. It shows up on my TiVo, along with ONE other tivo file I pulled from my box. The others are not showing up at all. Its been very frustrating to say the least.

[AAINO]

Hey, I think I figured out a possible solution to SnowJay and my problem. I found out if I rename all the .tivo files (with out adding the .tivo extension in the name) they will show up on my actual TiVo box. Its worked on everyone of the shows so far except for "Inside the Actor's Studio". Hopefully this will help other who are having the same problem.

[Dennis Wilkinson]

Hey, I think I figured out a possible solution to SnowJay and my problem. I found out if I rename all the .tivo files (with out adding the .tivo extension in the name) they will show up on my actual TiVo box. Its worked on everyone of the shows so far except for "Inside the Actor's Studio". Hopefully this will help other who are having the same problem.

I'm not sure I understand you -- you're renaming the files to no longer have the .TiVo extension, and that makes them work? You're not doing any other renaming? Not sure why that'd work (my own setup, also desktop 1.9.3 on 10.4.10, albeit on PPC) has files with the .TiVo extension which work fine.) You didn't have plain MPEG files with the wrong extension?

[AAINO]

Yeah, I know it seems very odd that it would work like that, but for some reason it did. Just to clarify though, I just removed the .tivo extension from the name of the .tivo file, not removed it from the file completely if that makes sense. I am sure they are not just mpeg files because I transfered them from my TiVo box using Tivo Transfer from Toast 8.

[snowjay]

Ok thanks for that little hint!

I found that if I rename .TiVo to .tivo they work. With no extension they seem to get added but don't show up on the TiVo. The show name on the TiVo is just the filename however, not nicely formatted like it does from my Windows box along with no program info.

with .TiVo:
10:32:56.398 Unable to find meta data from .TiVo file: /Users/jasone/TiVoShows/Ask_This_Old_House_Squeaky_hardwood_floor;_timber_stairs_118 2682798.TiVo with exception: java.lang.NullPointerException

with .tivo:
10:36:38.632 FileVideoRoot.rebuild: adding new shared file /Users/jasone/TiVoShows/Ask_This_Old_House_Squeaky_hardwood_floor;_timber_stairs_118 2682798.tivo

[Dennis Wilkinson]

How is the drive that contains your videos formatted?

I suppose if you've formatted the drive as HFS+ with case sensitivity turned on, you could see issues like this. I have my drives formatted with the "traditional" HFS+ (which is not case sensitive, but is case-preserving.) I've seen other Mac software deal poorly with case-sensitive HFS+ (and, to be fair, Unix programs ported to Mac OS X that deal poorly with case-insensitive HFS+).

As to how the show appears, that's likely a result of the XML response returned by the server and not anything to do with the file itself, which is why it'd differ from Mac OS to Windows.

[snowjay]

I don't believe I turned on case sensitivity. Where do I check that? I didn't see it in Disk Utility.

And I just noticed, while the files now show up on the TiVo I'm not able to download and play them back. They move to NPL but then have a time of 0:00 and say there was no signal on the channel.

[Dennis Wilkinson]

I don't believe I turned on case sensitivity. Where do I check that? I didn't see it in Disk Utility.

Just do a Get Info on the volume in the Finder. Case sensitivity is noted under "Format" (will probably look something like "Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled)")

[snowjay]

Ahh ok, wasn't sure if it would show up there. Nope, no case sensitivity.

[onionbag]

I swear, I read every page of this thread and can't seem to find the answer. It may be obvious, but I appreciate your response!

I'm trying to get the video push feature to work on my series 3, and can't seem to get it to work. Could it be that this feature is one of the many that just don't work with Series 3?

The photos and audio work just fine....

[minckster]

I swear, I read every page of this thread and can't seem to find the answer. It may be obvious, but I appreciate your response!

I'm trying to get the video push feature to work on my series 3, and can't seem to get it to work. Could it be that this feature is one of the many that just don't work with Series 3?

The photos and audio work just fine.... Correct, video push (frequently called TiVoComeBack) is not enabled on the Series3 or TiVo HD, so you cannot push videos onto the Series3. Most (some?) people believe that TiVo "is working on it" and expect the feature by the end of 2007. Info. (http://www.engadgethd.com/2007/07/24/qanda-with-tivos-jim-denney-about-tivo-hd/)

TiVo doesn't have an official name for the feature, so it goes by several different names, making your search for information about it unnecessarily difficult. It's the partner of "TiVo2Go", which has an official name if not consistent spelling. We'll probably get some version of both TiVoToGo and TiVoComeBack at the same time.

[onionbag]

Correct, video push (frequently called TiVoComeBack) is not enabled on the Series3 or TiVo HD, so you cannot push videos onto the Series3. Most (some?) people believe that TiVo "is working on it" and expect the feature by the end of 2007.

TiVo doesn't have an official name for the feature, so it goes by several different names, making your search for information about it unnecessarily difficult. It's the partner of "TiVo2Go", which has an official name if not consistent spelling. We'll probably get some version of both TiVoToGo and TiVoComeBack at the same time.

Many thanks for your help... and darn me for being an early adopter!

[bkane]

You can also change the name that's shown on the Now Playing List as well (so it doesn't use the file name itself). It is rather annoying to have all those .properties files hanging around in the folder though.

Has anyone figured out how to use the .properties file to tell the TiVo how long a file is?

[sean808080]

sad that a year later we still don't have video available on the mac side of house. i tried the zip file and see the video tab. my tivo doesn't show the videos as being available though...just music and photos.

:confused:

[bedelman]

sad that a year later we still don't have video available on the mac side of house. i tried the zip file and see the video tab. my tivo doesn't show the videos as being available though...just music and photos.

:confused:
Did you look in the Now Playing List? If you have the videos tab exposed and say to Publish My Videos (and have the correct Media Access Key in the preference pane), the computer should appear on the Now Playing List

[sean808080]

un....doh! thanks! see it there....now i just have to get videos encoded correctly and i'm set. :-)

[Marconi]

Has anyone figured out how to use the .properties file to tell the TiVo how long a file is?
I've been wondering about this myself. I cannot tell you what works, but I can tell you some things that don't.

I fiddled with adding:
duration=
rating=
quality=
to the file with no effects -- these are ignored (at least with the values I tried). As far as I know, only the
title=
description=
have any effect.

I did discover that the date/time line in the properties file is ignored (It starts with # and looks like a comment) and the mpeg file's modification date/time (not creation date/time) is shown on TiVo as the time recorded.

If anyone ever comes up with refinements to the .properties files, please share.

[oldskoolboarder]

I can see my mac but I can't see the .TIVO file I downloaded from my S2.

What format do the files have to be for Tivo Desktop and this tivo video sharing script?

[geowar]

I can see my mac but I can't see the .TIVO file I downloaded from my S2.

What format do the files have to be for Tivo Desktop and this tivo video sharing script?

If this file doesn't exist when the TiVo desktop server starts then it will create it (with the correct format). You just have to make sure that the file you want to serve is in the right directory (as set in the preference panel).

But to answer your question: The file has to be ASCII w/Unix line endings (LF)

For example, if you have a <ME_WIN_BIKE.mpg> file its <ME_WIN_BIKE.properties> file would look something like this:

[BEGIN]
#Thu Jan 04 19:22:39 PST 2007
description="Spy Hunter end game win on bike movie."
title=ME_WIN_BIKE.mpg
[END]

[Kipperman]

I don't believe I turned on case sensitivity. Where do I check that? I didn't see it in Disk Utility.

And I just noticed, while the files now show up on the TiVo I'm not able to download and play them back. They move to NPL but then have a time of 0:00 and say there was no signal on the channel.


Did you ever figure out a solution?

-Kipperman